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The Lavin Agency Speakers Bureau

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A master of speculative fiction proves that literature can show us our future—if we look.

Two-time Booker Prize-Winning Author of over 50 Books, Including The Handmaid’s Tale and its Recordbreaking Sequel,The Testaments

Margaret Atwood | Two-time Booker Prize-Winning Author of over 50 Books, Including The Handmaid's Tale, and its Recordbreaking Sequel, The Testaments
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Lavin Exclusive Speaker

Margaret Atwood has long been a literary titan, but “current events have polished the oracular sheen of her reputation” (The New Yorker). With her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale adapted into a fifteen-time Emmy Award-winning television series, and its sequel, The Testaments, winning the 2019 Booker Prize, Atwood’s sharp eye is more crucial—and prescient—than ever.

“Every totalitarian government on the planet has always taken a very great interest in women’s reproductive rights,” says Margaret Atwood; a disquieting insight at any time, but particularly in today’s portentous political landscape. Just as it did when it was first published, the story of The Handmaid’s Tale—a future where women are treated as property of the state, run by an authoritarian regime—is unearthing chilling patterns to an uneasy public. The book’s long-awaited sequel The Testaments performed so well it broke the record for best first-day sales of any Penguin Random House title that year. Having initially gone to press on the novel for 500,000 copies, the publisher went back twice for more copies in the span of just over a week.

With dry, ironic wit, a poetic sensibility and more than a hint of the Gothic, she has uncompromisingly observed the psychology of people in her society.The New York Times

With her work already producing two blockbuster television adaptations—first The Handmaid’s Tale, then Alias Grace—Atwood’s vision is reaching a wider audience than ever before. To date, The Handmaid’s Tale has received 54 Emmy nominations and 15 awards, including Best Drama, and Atwood herself received a standing ovation at the show. Meanwhile, Atwood’s Giller-winning, Booker-shortlisted murder mystery Alias Grace is now streaming on Netflix, and was notably written, produced, and directed by women. But before Atwood was a novelist, and before her work became the subject of award-winning TV, she was a poet. And recently, she released her first poetry collection in over a decade: Dearly. By turns “moving, playful, and wise,” the poems gathered in Dearly explore bodies and minds in transition, while observing the objects and rituals that ground us in the present moment. The Washington Post calls it “hauntingly beautiful, with reflections on life and death, time and chance, and nature and zombies.”

Atwood is the author of more than fifty volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction, and non-fiction. She is perhaps best known for her novels, which include The Edible Woman, The Robber Bride, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood. The Oryx and Crake trilogy, in particular, is being adapted into an HBO TV series by celebrated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky. To date, Atwood’s body of work has been published in more than 40 languages, including Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian. Atwood has also won many international literary awards, including the prestigious Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clarke Award, Governor General’s Award, the PEN Pinter Prize, the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was presented with the Companion of Honor award—given for achievements in the arts, literature, science, and politics—by Queen Elizabeth, making Atwood only the third Canadian to receive the honor. Atwood is a founder of the Writers’ Trust of Canada and a founding trustee of the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is also a popular personality on Twitter, with over two million followers.

Testimonials

Margaret’s keynote set the stage for the subsequent panel discussions that followed in exactly the manner that we hoped would be possible. Her exploration of compassion was multi-layered, witty, and provocative, teasing with both the familiar and surprising ways that compassion shows up in the everyday. Her comments had broad appeal to the many nurses in the audience and to the general public as well. She was simply charming. Our planning team was wholly satisfied that Margaret was a fantastic choice for this event.

University of Calgary, Faculty of Nursing

Speech Topics

Literature
An Evening with Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood can speak on a wide range of issues relating to literature, social activism, political engagement, the creative process, the artist’s role in society, technology and art, and, of course, her own accomplished body of work. Her pithy observations and witty comments enlighten and challenge audiences to think critically about our relationship to words and language. “The answers you get from literature,” she has said, “depend on the questions you pose.”

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