Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as 'gifted', who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift? Margaret Atwood's wide reference to other writers is balanced by anecdotes from her own experiences, both in Canada and on the international scene. The lightness of her touch is underlined by a seriousness about the purpose and the pleasures of writing, and by a deep familiarity with the myths and traditions of Western literature.

Margaret Atwood was born in 1939 in Ottawa and grew up in northern Quebec, Ontario and Toronto. She received her undergraduate degree from Victoria College at the University of Toronto and her master's degree from Radcliffe College. Throughout her thirty years of writing, Margaret Atwood has received numerous awards and honorary degrees. She is the author of more than twenty-five volumes of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, and is perhaps best known for her novels Margaret Atwood has been acclaimed for her talent for portraying both personal lives and problems of universal concern. Her work has been published in more than thirty-five languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Finnish, Korean, Icelandic and Estonian