Margaret Atwood

About Margaret Atwood

“The Hans Christian Andersen Literature Award is given to Margaret Atwood for her use of myths, fairy tales, and fantastical and speculative narratives to illuminate contemporary political issues, as well as for elevating so-called speculative fiction to a higher art form.”

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, born in Ottawa in 1939, who is also known as a critic, essayist, and poet, as well as an activist on feminist and ecological issues. A recipient of Man Booker and National Book Critics’ Awards, among others, her novels, poetry, and essay collections have touched on a wide range of issues, though she is particularly known for her in-depth and vivid depictions of gender and climate issues.

Atwood was deeply fascinated by myth and folklore from an early age, as can be seen in works such as Penelopiad (2005), a rewriting of The Odyssey from Penelope’s rather than Odysseus’ perspective, as well as in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which despite its immediate roots in the science fiction genre also clearly leans heavily on classic fairy tales. Throughout her career, Atwood has thus managed to blend traditional myths, fairy tales, and narrative forms with genres such as science fiction to illuminate both universally valid power structures between, for example, men and women, but has also managed to bring to the fore relevant contemporary political problems such as emerging religious fundamentalism, racism, and climate issues. Her MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) has thus been a weighty commentary on the cynicism of big business and the global pharmaceutical industry, but also on modern man’s overall blind faith in science as the solution to all (human) problems. This universal aspect of Atwood’s work has also recently manifested itself in the wild popularity The Handmaid’s Tale has experienced as a commentary on Trump’s politics (partly prompted by HBO’s film adaptation of the novel as a TV series), though it was originally written as a commentary on the Reagan-era’s resurgence of conservatism and misogynism.

Why Margaret Atwood wins the literature award in 2024

Atwood, like Andersen, has thus managed to use traditional narrative forms, but developed them further for the present in which they were written. In this context, Atwood has actively and critically entered the discussion of genre by insisting on using the term ‘speculative fiction’ for works such as The Handmaid’s Tale and the MaddAddam trilogy rather than ‘science fiction,’ which she generally regards as male-dominated, technology fetishistic, and futuristic rather than contemporary. Atwood, like Andersen, is thus both critically and artistically deeply engaged with the political and ethical potential of literature through innovative hybrids of traditional and newer narrative forms.

Margaret Atwood's acceptance speech

I am more than honoured to be receiving this inventive award, and to be joining such an august group of previous winners. I also appreciate the difficulties faced by the jury. The award is for a writer “whose work most closely resembles that of Hans Christian Anderson.” But what does that mean? Yes, he is best known for his fairy tales, but he wrote all kinds of other things: novels, plays, poems, travel writing. Maybe I was chosen for being prolific and eclectic, like Anderson. Or for my interest in the fantastic. Or for my fictions that are called either scientific or speculative – they might be considered a kind of dark fairy tale; but then, a lot of Anderson’s fairy tales were dark.  

As a child, “The Little Match Girl” made me cry, but so did “The Fir-Tree,” only I cried harder. What is it about, this story of a humble tree who is decked out in sparkling ornaments and worshipped at Christmas, but who is then burnt as firewood? The longing for the future, the deceptions of fame, the ingratitude of former admirers, the inevitability of mortality? As with so many of Anderson’s tales, the plot is straightforward, the moral is ambiguous, and the applications are multiple. That’s what makes these stories great works of literature rather than simple nursery tales.  

How many of Anderson’s fables have been invoked over the years in relation to contemporary situations? And which one would I choose as most appropriate for the present moment? “The Emperor’s New Clothes” springs to mind: as a parable of political sycophancy, it can scarcely be bettered. Republicans of the United States, please take notice.  

I first encountered Anderson at the age of nine or ten, when – inspired by the Brothers Grimm – I was reading any fairy tales and related writing I could get my hands on: the Andrew Lang fairy books, George Macdonald, Poe’s tales of the fantastic, Charles Perrault, ghost stories, Aesop’s Fables, and so forth. Naturally, I read Anderson. “The Snow Queen” was especially resonant in later years, since I was writing a thesis for Harvard that cycled around Victorian supernatural female figures and their descendants in the work of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein. 

At this age, also, I was taken to the film, The Red Shoes, as a birthday party treat, so suitable for little girls. Yes, the Red Shoes ballet in it was mesmerizing, but did we really need to see a talented ballet dancer squashing herself with a train due to a conflict between Love and Art? What was the message? Girls should not be artists? Girls should not wear red shoes? In Anderson’s tale, the girl is punished for her vanity; thus, was being a girl artist an example of vanity? Most likely. In that postwar period when women were being shooed back into their homes, almost any female vocation was viewed that way. 

Did “The Red Shoes” – both the tale and the film – have an influence on my own work? Of course. The colour red is employed extensively in The Handmaid’s Tale, and not positively. I add that it was in Copenhagen that Poul Ruders first approached me with his idea for writing The Handmaid’s Tale opera. It was in the reception area of the Hotel d’Angleterre. He knelt down on the carpet and said, “I must write The Handmaid’s Tale. I have to write The Handmaid’s Tale. If I can’t write The Handmaid’s Tale, I don’t want to write any opera at all!” The carpet was red. Coincidence? I don’t think so. 

When he first started publishing, Anderson was reprimanded by his stern, child-punishing contemporaries for being too entertaining. Children should be lectured to and chastised, not charmed and amused. But Anderson knew something they didn’t, which is why he has lasted and they haven’t: if it doesn’t hold our attention, we will turn away. I’m with him. It sometimes means the adjective “frivolous” is applied to you, but better that than “unread.” 

So, my thanks again for this wonderful award. It means a great deal to me, and I will treasure it always. Or rather, I will treasure it until I too have all my sparkling ornaments removed from me and I’m burnt up as firewood. Which is a much more Andersonian ending than “always.”  

Thank you. 

Speech by Anne-Marie Mai  

Intelligent and quick repartee is characteristic of Margaret Atwood. As a reader, you can almost become addicted to watching or reading Margaret Atwood interviews – her wit always lights up and is inspiring. But as literary researcher you can be a little heavy at heart on behalf of your colleagues, who repeatedly look for a biographical key to the authorship in Atwood’s childhood instead of talking about the artistic distinctiveness and value of her works. Yawn, you say to yourself, how does Margaret Atwood find the energy to circle around the same questions over and over again. But Margaret Atwood is not yawning. She is a top professional who always brings a new perspective to the interview, as when an interviewer confidentially leaned forward and asked Atwood if she is a witch or a seer, to which Atwood's eyes flashed and her special smile appeared. No, she answered, I am not; I just read history. And when it comes to the influence of writers’ childhoods on their work, she had said that if there is anything common in writers’ childhood it is books and solitude. Take this to heart! Her interviews and essays show that she is generous and refers to other authors, talks about what she is reading and what she can recommend. What a human and artistic surplus, you think.  She has often reflected on what an author is and on one occasion she referred to Hans Christian Andersen:  

The writer is, among other things, a messenger, a traveler between worlds, an interpreter, an intermediary... they are doomed to relive endlessly the story of the Emperor’s new clothes: they speak what polite society, or the political powers that be, would rather have unspoken, and for that reason they are constantly being told to sit down and shut up. (Atwood, “English Teachers Speech”, 1986, Indirections, 11,1 13) 

Thankfully, Margaret Atwood hasn't sat down and kept her mouth shut. She speaks and she writes, she is critical, emotional and original, a modern master. Hans Christian Andersen made the artistic fairy tale his special genre; Margaret Atwood calls her genre speculative fiction, and here different genres and inspirations work together – everything from George Orwell to the English Romantics and modernists, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.  Speculative fiction is a counterpart to the science fiction genre, which Atwood finds too futuristic and techno fetishistic. Speculative fiction builds its vision of the future on what has already happened or can happen. One of her most important novels is A Handmaid's Tale, a work about a society that has become an authoritarian, religious regime, based on total control over women's fertility. We are in a world where environmental disasters have caused the birth rate to fall dramatically, and now young fertile women are kept as breeding animals by the rulers who pass on their genres by raping the young women.  Other able-bodied women and men live slave-like lives as servants or guards, while all others are deported to the colonies as forced laborers or collectors of radioactive waste. The novel's female protagonist has lost her memory when she was abducted by the rulers, but nevertheless begins to remember fragments of her past and of her husband and child. Slowly her resilience grows. This starts with a simple, concrete and sensual experience of the outside world. Something quite everyday like, which is an important point! Resistance grows from an ability to sense the outside world. The novel is from 1986 but is far ahead of its time in its depiction of today's many signs of the undermining of democracies and the pervasive environmental catastrophe.  Today, the novel is considered a world literary classic, and the deep insight into the characteristic of totalitarianism that Atwood provides helps readers all over the world to understand and react against the threats of the present. Women who today protest against the limitation of their reproductive freedoms have begun to appear in the costume that the young women in Atwood's novel are forced to wear. How beautiful and important it is that a novel anywhere in the world can become a token for a protest against the oppression of women's rights and for freedom.  For many readers, A Handmaid's Tale is the jewel of Atwood’s authorship, a novel, with which many begin their Atwood-reading. But they soon discover that there is an entire Margaret Atwood library to continue with, even when you have finished devouring the successful TV dramatization of the A Handmaid’s Tale, have seen the opera or experienced the ballet version. Margaret Atwood’s authorship counts a total of more than 60 books.  A Handmaid's Tale was sequelled with The Testaments, in which Atwood develops her speculative fiction. It might seem as if the universe of the novels is far away from todays, but you discover that everything has actually either happened or can. Its creepy, as the author herself has said, about how today's approaches totalitarianism, especially based on religion and politics being mixed. There is eeriness in her storytelling, but there is also an incredible humor and an insistence on the possibilities of finding ways out. Margaret Atwood uses patterns and motifs from world literature’s classics and from the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen.  

Atwood explains the relation to the literary tradition and the poets of the past in her essays, Negotiating with the Dead. A Writer on Writing (2002). She says: “The dead may guard the treasure but it’s useless unless it can be brought back into the land of the living and allowed to enter time once more – which means to enter the realm of the audience, the realm of readers, and the realm of change.” (178- 179)  

Margaret Atwood's poems are a very special chapter in her great oeuvre. They are pointed, they have irrefutable images, they evoke thoughts, and there is sometimes a very complicated interplay between different voices in the poems. One of the poems that makes a special impression is “A Sad Child” from 1995, where the prelude is grim and direct and with an unmistakable image 

You're sad because you're sad. 

It's psychic. It's the age. It's chemical. 

Go see a shrink or take a pill, 

or hug your sadness like an eyeless doll 

you need to sleep. 

You can't get rid of the image of sadness as a blind doll – but you can't help but read on – and it doesn't get any less disturbing but read for yourself! And this is often the case with Atwood's texts; they grab hold of the reader's thought and imagination.  

Atwood is also engaged in children’s literature, and she resembles Hans Christian Andersen in her understanding of how fairy tales might begin in the middle of language, with a linguistic play of letters or rhymes of syllables. Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut (1995), illustrated by Maryann Kovalski, uses the letter P as a driver for a wonderful fairy tale of a self-absorbed little girl who needs guidance. It is funny, charming and opens a playful understanding of literary language.     

This fairy tale has a special sweetness and humor, that is also part of her latest book, Old Babes in the Wood (2023). The enlightening and ironic spirit of Margaret Atwood sparkles but there is also so much sweetness and love in the portrayal of two old sisters in an old house, that their father built and where one of them spent many with her late husband. Just listen: 

High up on the wall above the wood stove hangs the flat, oblong frying pan that Nell and Tig bought at a farm auction about forty-odd years ago, and on which the jovial sourdough pancake fryings often took place, Tig doing the flipping, back when largesse and riotous living and growing children had been the order of the day. Coming up! Who’s next? She can't look directly at this griddle – she glances up at it, then glances away – but she always knows it's there.                                                 My heart is broken, Nell thinks. But in our family, we don't say, "My heart is broken." We say, "Are there any cookies?" One must eat. One must keep busy. One must distract oneself. But why? What for? For whom?" Are there any cookies?" she manages to croak out. 

There are so many great books by Margaret Atwoods – and each of them is a good reason to award her the Hans Christian Andersen's Literature Award. Atwood is ahead of her time on the challenges of environment and human rights that concern people all over the world.  

Her oeuvre has given literature and readers a new space of art. She makes her readers wiser and sharpens their emotions. Funny, creepy, touching, important.