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YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS: So, Margaret Atwood, your latest novel
Independent, The (London), Apr 29, 2004
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1939, but her family lived in North Quebec where her father, Carl, ran a forest-insect research station. She first attended full-time school as an eight- year-old, while living in Toronto. She studied English at Toronto University. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. Ten novels later, she won the Booker prize in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, and her 11th novel, Oryx and Crake, was this week short- listed for the 2004 Orange prize for fiction. She lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.
Was there a moment when you decided to become a writer? Or did it creep up on you slowly?
Tom Wilkinson, Rye
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It crept up on me suddenly, while I was crossing the football field of my high school in 1956. No one knows why.
You were carried into the woods in a backpack as a young child, and you spent many formative years there in North Quebec. How has that experience influenced your writing?
Bob Fletcher, London
I spent the springs, summers and falls there. There were no cinemas, theatres or radio shows, and there was no television. So books were it. When I'd read through the available supply, I read them again. Doubtless I imprinted on books as a form, because they were really the only form available to me, except for pictures in magazines.
Will you write an autobiography, or do you prefer to keep us guessing?
Michael Jones, by e-mail
I lead an uneventful and boringly virtuous life. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?
Your latest novel, Oryx and Crake, foretells the end of the human race. Fiction aside, how long do you think we've got left?
Sarah Baker, Edinburgh
I don't think the human race as such will end. Our present civilisation, however, is balanced on the edge. Will we be able to sustain our present level of consumption? If not, will chaos result? Will our very sophisticated systems break down? Do we all need to give some thought to the uses of duct tape and how to grow potatoes on our roofs?
Among the reams written about you and your work by academics and students, have you found anything insightful or interesting?
Clare Shannon, by e-mail
Such material is the Medusa's head. Look at it and you turn to stone. I'm glad it keeps people busily employed and off the streets, but I don't have to read it.
You wrote The Handmaid's Tale (1985) years before the world woke up to fundamentalism, the US moral majority, George W Bush or other nightmares of totalitarianism. What inspired you to be so prescient?
Jim Hyde, London
Actually, most of the forces now in play were already at play when I was writing the book. No one can predict the future - there are too many variables - but you can make educated guesses. A lamb is likely to become a sheep rather than an octopus, unless something untoward takes place. My other sources were historical. I refused to put anything into the book that hadn't already been done, somewhere, at some time. We humans do have a rather limited repertoire, and we're good at creating Hell.
Are you nostalgic for your early days as a writer? I understand you used to recite your poetry in bohemian coffeehouses. It sounds very romantic.
Jules Mason, London
It does sound romantic, doesn't it? Actually, it was kind of smoky. Also, every time you came to your most plangent line, someone would flush the toilet or turn on the espresso machine. No, I'm not too nostalgic. I was consumed with anxiety. Young people have a lot of stresses on them. They don't know how the plot is likely to turn out.
What lengths do you go to in order to make sure that your novels are historically accurate?
Eileen Macdonald, Dundee
I turn every stone I can find. I refuse to violate known fact.
An American woman writer was quoted in The Independent as saying: "Every female writer should be married to Graeme Gibson." Do you agree?
Lisa Thomson, Grantham
The house would get very crowded.
Would the world be a better place without literary critics?
Jo Stella, Leeds
Actually, no. Think of them as the town criers or the village gossips. "Love the shoes, hated the hat, and did you get a load of that metaphor..." But at least they let people know that an event has taken place, so you can go and see for yourself. I write literary criticism myself, from time to time. But I'm not chained to a desk in the cellar, lashed by an editor who demands controversy, so I can write about books I like.
Do you have any entirely trivial pastimes?
Owen Hey, Reading
I watch peculiar science-fiction films. Also - when unobserved - puffball comedies such as Legally Blonde.
Would you ever write a novel about terrorism? Is it something that concerns you? Or do you think there are more dangerous forces at work?
Katie Everett, by e-mail
Terrorism is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Many political movements have used it as a tool, but they themselves have not had much in common (the IRA, the Red Brigades, the Anarchists in the 19th century, and so forth). The really dangerous force at work in the world is the combination of global warming and resource depletion, coupled with population growth. That cocktail, if not planned for, will kill far more people and cause far more social disruption than the current problems will.
