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Top paper award from our ArtPolitical conference announced
The Margaret Atwood Society co-hosted “ArtPolitical: Margaret Atwood’s Aesthetics” October 14 through 16, 2021 at the University of Göttingen, Germany. We were pleased to award $250USD prize to the top paper, which was awarded to Manuel Sousa Oliveira (Porto) for his outstanding paper “Both Fox and Cat: The Politics of Ambiguity in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments.” The first runner-up was Loredana Filip’s paper “Literary Synesthesia and Human-Nonhuman Interactions in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy” and second runner-up was Tatiana Konrad for her paper “Veganism, Ecoethics, and Climate Change in Margaret Atwood’s ‘MaddAddam’ Trilogy.”
We congratulate all of our presenters and our conveners, Dr. Dunja Mohr (Erfurt) and Dr. Kirsten Sandrock (Göttingen) for an excellent conference.
The conference was also supported by the German Research Foundation, the Association for Canadian Studies in German-speaking Countries and the Hans-Böckler-Foundation.
Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power (documentary) opens Friday
The 92 minute documentary on Atwood’s life and literary career, Margaret Atwood: A Word after a Word after a Word is Power screens at the Lightbox in Toronto on Nov. 7. It then opens Nov. 8 in Hamilton and Waterloo, Nov. 11 in Edmonton, Nov. 13 in Ottawa, and Nov. 14 in Toronto.
In the United States, the documentary will start streaming Nov. 19 on Hulu. The European debut will be at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam on Nov. 23. The doc has been sold to other foreign territories besides Hulu, including ARTE in France and Germany, Sky in the U.K., and HBO for Central Europe, on top of sales to Australia, New Zealand, The Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and even Iran.
The documentary is co-directed by Nancy Lang and Peter Raymont, who shadowed Atwood and her partner Graeme Gibson for twelve months. Sarah Polley, Adrienne Clarkson, Elisabeth Moss, and Volker Schlöndorf also appear, and Tatiana Maslany reads Atwood’s poetry and prose.
For more information on the documentary, see these articles in the Hollywood Reporter, National Post, Community Press, and Now Toronto. Follow our social media for more information on specific countries’ release dates as they become available.
Atwood wins second Booker Prize
Margaret Atwood’s novel The Testaments, the long-awaited followup to 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, has won the 2019 Booker Prize. The prize is split with British writer Bernardine Evaristo for her lively feminist work, an eclectic book the author calls “fusion fiction” called Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood and Evaristo will share the £50,000 prize.
Both are are gracious in sharing the prize:
“It would have been quite embarrassing for a person of my age and stage to have won the whole thing and thereby hinder a person in an earlier stage of their career from going through that door,” said Atwood.
Evaristo said, “I’m just so delighted to have won the prize. Yes, I am sharing it with an amazing writer. But I am not thinking about sharing it; I am thinking about the fact that I am here and that’s an incredible thing considering what the prize has meant to me and my literary life, and the fact that it felt so unattainable for decades.”
After a tie in 1992, Booker changed its rules to prevent another tie from occurring, but after deliberations went on for five hours, judges “essentially staged a sit-in in the judging room.” According to Chairman Peter Florence, “Our consensus was that it was our decision to flout the rules,” he said. “I think laws are inviolable and rules are adaptable to the circumstance.”
This is Atwood’s second Booker; she won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. Evaristo is the first black woman to win the Booker. “I hope that honor doesn’t last too long,” she said in her acceptance speech.
Info from this post came from The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The New York Times.
A note about The Booker Prize:
The Booker is the most prestigious British literary award and comes with a handsome prize of £50,000. The prize was originally known as the Booker–McConnell Prize, when the Booker–McConnell company began sponsoring the prize in 1969. Later it became known as simply the Booker Prize. It was previously awarded to a full-length novel written in English by an author from the Commonwealth of Nations or Ireland, but now can be awarded to any English language novel published in the UK. As of June 1, 2019, the Booker Prize is now sponsored by the Crankstart Foundation, of California not the Man Group as it was for the past 18 years (when it was referred to as the Man Booker Prize), and is known again as simply the Booker Prize.
Atwood Live in Theaters Sept. 10
Have you gotten your tickets yet for Atwood Live?
Have you seen the trailer?
From Fathom events:
On Tuesday, September 10, the wait will be over . . . The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s highly anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, will be revealed. The momentous literary event will be celebrated with an exclusive cinema event, captured live and broadcast later that same evening — as Fane Productions present an evening with the Canadian novelist, poet, literary critic, and inventor.
The publication of Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale in 1985 and the current, Emmy Award-winning television series have created a cultural phenomenon, as handmaids have become a symbol of women’s rights and a protest against misogyny and oppression. Atwood will be interviewed by broadcaster and author Samira Ahmed in a conversation spanning the length of Atwood’s remarkable career, her diverse range of works, and why she has returned to her seminal handmaid story, 34 years later.
“Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” –Margaret Atwood
With exclusive readings from the new book by special guests Ann Dowd, Lily James, and Sally Hawkins, this will be an unmissable and intimate event with Atwood, spotlighting her signature insight, humor and intellect.
Atwood on long list for Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction
The Toronto Star announced today that the books longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize for fiction have been chosen.
Twelve Canadian books are on the list for the Giller Prize for fiction, selected from a field of 117 books. Margaret Atwood’s fiction has made the Giller list three times, her novels Alias Grace in 1996 (which won), Oryx and Crake in 2003, and The Year of the Flood in 2009. Please see the article in the Star for information on this year’s other eleven nominees.
Six finalists will be announced Sept. 30, and the Giller winner will be announced at a gala in Toronto on Nov. 18.
UPDATE: On Sept. 30, The Testaments was not included on the shortlist.
About the Giller Prize for fiction: The prize was founded in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch to honor his wife, literary journalist and former Toronto Star books editor Doris Giller. The prize is $100,000 CAD.
Atwood is shortlisted for Booker Prize
The excitement builds as thirteen shrinks to six! The long list for the Booker prize has been reduced to the six finalists, including Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which comes out a week from today (!!) and Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte (both authors have won the award previously, Atwood for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and Rushdie for Midnight’s Children in 1981).
The other finalists are Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evaristo, Chigozie Obioma, and Elif Shafak. Information about these books can be found at the NYT.
The winner will be announced Oct. 14 at a ceremony in London and will receive a prize of £50,000 (NYT estimates $61,000 USD today).
Atwood’s The Testaments included in Booker longlist, is in the running for the Booker Prize
Margaret Atwood won the Booker Prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and is in the running again for the prize for her upcoming novel The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, which will be released on September 10. Atwood has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, first for The Handmaid’s Tale in 1986, when she lost out to Kingsley Amis, and most recently in 2003 for Oryx and Crake.
The Guardian reports that 13 finalists were chosen among 131 novels for the longlist. Previous winner Salman Rushdie is also on the longlist (Rushdie won in 1981 for Midnight’s Children). Among the other eleven are the American-born Lucy Ellmann (who moved to England as a teenager), English writer Jeanette Winterson, Nigerian author Chigozie Obioma, and Irish author Kevin Barry.
According to the New York Times, “a ferocious nondisclosure agreement” prevented the prize’s judges from revealing any of the plot of The Testaments, but they did say it is “terrifying and exhilarating.”
A note about The Booker Prize:
The Booker is the most prestigious British literary award and comes with a handsome prize of £50,000. The prize was originally known as the Booker–McConnell Prize, when the Booker–McConnell company began sponsoring the prize in 1969. Later it became known as simply the Booker Prize. It was previously awarded to a full-length novel written in English by an author from the Commonwealth of Nations or Ireland. but now can be awarded to any English language novel published in the UK. As of June 1, 2019, the Booker Prize is now sponsored by the Crankstart Foundation of California not the Man Group as it was for the past 18 years (when it was referred to as the Man Booker Prize), and is known again as simply the Booker Prize.
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