Margaret Atwood este una dintre scriitoarele care nu imbatrinesc. are twitter, blog, converseaza via chat cu cititorii, isi lanseaza cartile pe hirtie reciclabila si scrie despre lumi care par un amestec de Matrix cu Inception si cu feminism.
si are 72 de ani

nu-i place sa i se spuna ca scrie SF.
pentru editia de week end a ziarului The Guardian, Atwood a scris un eseu despre relatia sa cu literatura SF.

Recently I set out to explore my lifelong relationship with science fiction, both as reader and as writer. I say “lifelong”, for among the first things I wrote as a child might well merit the initials SF. Like a great many children before and since, I was an inventor of other worlds. Mine were rudimentary, as such worlds are when you’re six or seven or eight, but they were emphatically not of this here-and-now Earth, which seems to be one of the salient features of SF. I wasn’t much interested in Dick and Jane: the creepily ultra-normal characters did not convince me. Saturn was more my speed, and other realms even more outlandish. Our earliest loves, like revenants, have a way of coming back in other forms; or, to paraphrase Wordsworth, the child is mother to the woman. To date, I have written three full-length fictions that nobody would ever class as sociological realism: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood. Are these books “science fiction”, I am often asked. Though sometimes I am not asked, but told: I am a silly nit or a snob or a genre traitor for dodging the term because these books are as much “science fiction” as Nineteen Eighty-Four is, whatever I might say. But is Nineteen Eighty-Four as much “science fiction” as The Martian Chronicles? I might reply. I would answer not, and therein lies the distinction.

de aici

cind a lansat The Handmaid’s Tale (povestea cameristei) am avut placerea si onoarea sa fac un interviu cu Margaret Atwood.

It is said that for a writer, each novel is a correction to the one that came before. What is your aim? And the aim of your work?

The aim of any writer is to complete whatever book he or she is working on in such a way that the reader, too, will wish to complete it.
As for the aims of my work, this is a subject best left to critics. They can have a good deal more fun with it than I will ever have.
Let’s just say I write about whatever happens to interest me at the time. I’ve had many interests.

restul interviului aici