Margaret Atwood

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 April 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood. Born just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Margaret Atwood spent much of her childhood in the Canadian outback where her father's work involved studying insects. She grew up mostly without television, cinema, mains electricity or even a proper road to civilisation. For company she had only her parents and her brother, with whom she wrote "serials, mainly about space travel".

It wasn't until her teens that the urge to write struck seriously, an event she describes as "a large, invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed." After University, a spell in England and a period teaching early morning classes to engineering students she had her first novel, The Edible Woman, published. Since then she has written nine more novels, four of which were Booker nominated with The Blind Assassin finally winning in 2000. Three of those novels have been made into films: Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin. She has also published some dozen books of poetry, five collections of short stories, four books for children and assorted non-fiction titles. Her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, set in a genetically engineered, post-apocalyptic landscape is published on May 5th this year.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Shepherd's Hymn from Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Stories from 1001 Arabian Nights - traditional Luxury: A huge vat of Culpepers Rose Geranium bath salts

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My costaway this week is a writer, shortlisted three times for the book
0:27.0	a prize. She finally won it three years ago with the Blind Assassin. She's produced
0:31.6	11 novels altogether as well as poetry, short stories and criticism.
0:36.0	Above all, she's a storyteller, writing and rewriting her narrative until the final tale emerges,
0:42.0	often unsettling, infused with pain,
0:45.0	but always peopled by interesting characters.
0:48.0	Her childhood was unusual.
0:50.0	Her father, an entomologist took his family
0:52.0	for long periods into the forests of Northern Canada,
0:55.0	where left to her own devices she developed her observational skills.
0:59.2	Her first novel was published in 1969.
1:02.0	Since then, she sold millions, translated into at least 20
1:05.4	different languages. Her latest, Orix and Craig, is published next month and
1:09.8	an opera of another, The Handmaid's Tale, opened this month at the ENO.
1:14.4	It's an accident that I'm a successful writer, she says.
1:18.0	I'm a serious writer and I never expected to become a popular one. She is Margaret Atwood. You didn't, I think, Margaret
1:26.1	expect to become a writer at all. Did you? You wanted to do all sorts of other things?
1:30.3	I didn't really consider writing much until I was 16 and I've always admired my high school
1:38.8	English teacher from the time when I was 15 because when they came to do a documentary on me and said to her what was she like in your class
1:46.0	most teachers would have said oh she was fantastic I could see right away she had all this
	...

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