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Winners of the 2023 Margaret Atwood Society Awards

Congratulations to the 2023 winners of the
Margaret Atwood Society Awards!

Best Book on Atwood and Her Work:The Fiction of Margaret Atwood, by Fiona Tolan, Bloomsbury 2023.

Best Article: “The Shape of Your Absence”: Coming to Terms with Loss and Grief in Margaret Atwood’s Dearly” in Canadian Studies June 2023), by Pauline Montassine, Université de Reims

Best Graduate Essay or MA Thesis: “Prelapsarian Ustopias: Reversing the Genetic Fall in Octavia E. Butler’s Lilith’s Brood Trilogy and Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy,” by Maya Hollander, MPhil thesis, Cambridge

Best Undergraduate Essay (tie): “Through Double Doors,” by Maria Dunlap, California State University, Northridge, and “The Art of the Fragmented Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin,” by Mina Baniewicz, Saint Xavier University (Chicago)

Fourteen Days, a collaborative novel set early in the Covid-19 pandemic and edited by Margaret Atwood, out 6 February, 2024

A groundbreaking idea that could only come from the brilliant mind of Margaret Atwood is a new collaborative novel that Atwood has co-written and edited.

From the publisher:

Set in a Lower East Side tenement in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Fourteen Days is an irresistibly propulsive collaborative novel from the Authors Guild, with an unusual twist: each character in this diverse, eccentric cast of New York neighbors has been secretly written by a different, major literary voice—from Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston to Tommy Orange and Celeste Ng.

One week into the COVID-19 shutdown, tenants of a Lower East Side apartment building in Manhattan have begun to gather on the rooftop and tell stories. With each passing night, more and more neighbors gather, bringing chairs and milk crates and overturned pails. Gradually the tenants—some of whom have barely spoken to each other—become real neighbors. In this Decameron-like serial novel, general editor Margaret Atwood, Authors Guild president Douglas Preston, and a star-studded list of contributors create a beautiful ode to the people who couldn’t escape when the pandemic hit. A dazzling, heartwarming, and ultimately surprising narrative, Fourteen Days reveals how beneath the horrible loss and suffering, some communities managed to become stronger.

Includes writing from Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Jennine Capó Crucet, Joseph Cassara, Angie Cruz, Pat Cummings, Sylvia Day, Emma Donoghue, Dave Eggers, Diana Gabaldon, Tess Gerritsen, John Grisham, Maria Hinojosa, Mira Jacob, Erica Jong, CJ Lyons, Celeste Ng, Tommy Orange, Mary Pope Osborne, Douglas Preston, Alice Randall, Ishmael Reed, Roxana Robinson, Nelly Rosario, James Shapiro, Hampton Sides, R.L. Stine, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Monique Truong, Scott Turow, Luis Alberto Urrea, Rachel Vail, Weike Wang, Caroline Randall Williams, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, and Meg Wolitzer.

MLA 2024 CFP

Dressing the Part: Fashion in Atwood’s Works and Adaptations
The Margaret Atwood Society invites papers on depictions of fashion in Atwood’s works and adaptations, understood broadly as relating to clothing, style, or expressions of socio-political or technical change. 250-word abstract and bio due 3/15.
Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, 15 March 2023
Lauren Rule Maxwell, The Citadel (lauren.maxwell@citadel.edu ) Lee Frew, York U (leefrew@yorku.ca )

Atwood to release first short story collection since 2014

Margaret Atwood’s next book, Old Babes in the Wood, will be her first short story collection since 2014’s Stone Mattress. The collection is available for pre-order now and will be released on March 7, 2023.

Penguin Random House promises “a dazzling collection of short stories that look deeply into the heart of family relationships, marriage, loss and memory, and what it means to spend a life together,” and goes on to praise: “Atwood showcases both her creativity and her humanity in these remarkable tales which by turns delight, illuminate, and quietly devastate.”

Old Babes in the Wood by Margaret Atwood

Anthology featuring Atwood to be released March 6

Touted as a “fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales to celebrate Virago’s 50th birthday,” Furies: Stories of the Wicked, Wild, and Untamed will be released on March 6, 2023, and will include new and original short stories by Margaret Atwood, Susie Boyt, Eleanor Crewes, Emma Donoghue, Stella Duffy, Linda Grant, Claire Kohda, CN Lester, Kirsty Logan, Caroline O’Donoghue, Chibundu Onuzo, Helen Oyeymi, Rachel Seiffert, Kamila Shamsie, and Ali Smith.

Furies: Stories of the wicked, wild and untamed

The Handmaid’s Tale season 5

Hulu announced “The Handmaid’s Tale” will return for season 5 on September 14, unfortunately without Emily (Alexis Bledel).

Pilar Somacarrera Íñigo publishes a new book on Atwood

Learn about it here.

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.