Margaret Atwood: “Ooooh! Are we going to talk about dying?”

The Canadian author reflects on ageing, generational inequality, reworking Shakespeare and writing stories that no one will read for a century.

By Erica Wagner

The speculative author: Margaret Atwood, photographed for the New Statesman by Kate Peters at the Royal Over-Seas League Club, London in October

During our couple of days together I observe that Atwood is interested in absolutely everything, from when the theatre in Ilkley was built to the differences between British and American sign language (we have a sign-language interpreter for our event). Look at the arc of her work and you will understand why the term “speculative fiction”, rather than “science fiction”, applies. She likes the term the French have for the former: roman d’anticipation. From the feminism of The Edible Woman and The Handmaid’s Tale to the vision of a world trashed by its human inhabitants in the MaddAddam trilogy, she draws her conclusions simply by looking at the world around her and imagining what might come next.