Introduction: A Writer on Writing

When Margaret Atwood as international literary celebrity lectured at the University of Cambridge in 2000, these were the three questions which she addressed. Those lectures, published under the Gothic title Negotiating with the Dead, combined personal anecdotes about her own life as a writer with less personal topics like authorship and creativity, fame, literary tradition and changing aesthetic fashions, and the writer’s social responsibility. As she wryly remarked, she ought to know something about those topics as someone ‘who’s been laboring in the wordmines for, say, forty years’ (Negotiating with the Dead, p. xvii). A versatile and prolific writer, Atwood has produced eleven novels and as many volumes of poetry, three collections of short stories, in addition to five important books of literary and cultural criticism as well as numerous essays, reviews and forewords to other people’s books. She has also written three children’s books, and compiled and illustrated The CanLit Foodbook, and is the editor of the Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English and co-editor of the Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English. Her work has been translated and published in more than thirty-five languages.