Margaret Atwood, writer

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer. She has published more than sixty books spanning novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, children’s literature, and graphic novels, and has been called “one of the sharpest and most imaginative novelists writing in English”. She is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice: for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for her 2019 follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.

Margaret was born in Ottawa in November 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the second of three children to Carl Atwood, an entomologist. During her early life, she would spend the warmer months in the remote forests of northern Quebec and Ontario where her father tracked insect infestations, and the winters in the city (first Ottawa, later Toronto). She didn’t attend school for a full year until the age of twelve.

Her childhood scribblings – a “novel” about an ant called Annie, a volume of rhyming poems about cats, and a play about a giant – turned into a more serious ambition to become a writer when Margaret was sixteen.

After studying English at the University of Toronto, where she began publishing poems in the college magazine, her first novel, The Edible Woman, came out in 1969, following five collections of poetry.

Her most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, was published in 1985 and depicted a dystopian vision of the United States as a patriarchal and totalitarian place called Gilead. Although it was written during the Reagan era, it has become eerily relevant again in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.

Margaret lost her life partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019. She lives in Toronto.

DISC ONE: Anchors Aweigh - US Navy Band
DISC TWO: Hearts of Stone - The Charms
DISC THREE: Offenbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann, Giulietta Act: Barcarolle. Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour. Performed by Joan Sutherland (soprano) Huguette Tourangeau (soprano), Plácido Domingo (tenor), Andre Neury (bass), Pro Arte Choir, Lausanne, Choeur Du Brassus, Choeur de la Radio Suisse Romande, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Richard Bonynge
DISC FOUR: Four Strong Winds - Ian & Sylvia
DISC FIVE: Barrett’s Privateers - Stan Rogers
DISC SIX: The Handmaid's Tale, Act I Scene 6: The Doctor. Composed by Poul Ruders and performed by Marianne Rorholm, Hanne Fischer (Mezzo-sopranos), Royal Danish Opera Chorus and Royal Danish Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schønwandt
DISC SEVEN: We Praise the Tiny Perfect Moles - Orville Stoeber
DISC EIGHT: Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 "Pastoral": II. Scene am Bach. Andante molto moto. Composed by Beethoven and performed by Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer

BOOK CHOICE: How to Survive on a Desert Island by Samantha Bell
LUXURY ITEM: A knife and matchbox
CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Hearts of Stone - The Charms

Presenter: Lauren Laverne
Producer: Sarah Taylor