12 Things You Didn’t Know About Author Margaret Atwood

1 She has nearly as many letters after her name as her name itself: Margaret Atwood CC OOnt CH FRSC. Respectively they stand for : Order of Canada, Order of Ontario, Order of Companions of Honor and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

2 Her middle name is Eleanor.

3 Atwood began writing plays and poems when she was six years old.

4 She spent much of her childhood scrabbling around in the backwoods of northern Quebec, Canada, with her entomologist Father.

5 Atwood’s métier is as a writer of speculative fiction – a genre that covers writings about things that have actually happened in reality.

6 She is so good at it that she is the most successful female dystopian author of all time and easily rubs shoulders with the likes of Orwell, Huxley and Ballard.

7 The opening line of her most famous novel The Handmaid’s Tale is: ‘We slept in what once had been the gymnasium.’

8 The Handmaid’s Tale is a reference in the Hebrew Bible that means a female servant.

9 The Handmaid’s Tale title also follows in the literary wake of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales with chapters titled The Parson’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale.

10 The sequel to her best selling book also has a biblical title – The Testaments – it is a reference to both tomes of the Christian Bible.

11 Although she is an accomplished writer, Margaret Atwood claims to be a terrible speller.

12 She is the inventor and developer of the LongPen a remote robotic technology that enables the writing of documents from a distance. Say what? 😮

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood published by Vintage Publishing is out now, buy it here

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