Desert Island Discs Margaret Atwood, writer
Bohemian Embassy Folk Memory
- At the Bohemian Embassy coffeehouse, a young Sylvia Fricker sang folk songs that stuck with Atwood and inspired her choice of Ian & Sylvia's Four Strong Winds.
- She framed the folk scene as formative to her 1960s cultural memory.
Market Research Inspired A Novel
- While working as a market researcher, Atwood typed her novel at the office and reviewed absurd questionnaires like a 35-page laxative survey.
- She used these market-research experiences directly as material for The Edible Woman.
Cold War Berlin Shaped Gilead's Texture
- Writing The Handmaid's Tale in West Berlin amid Cold War tensions heightened Atwood's sense of how fragile democracies can be.
- She observed fear, surveillance, and the visible presence of authoritarianism as fertile conditions for imagining Gilead.
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer. She has published more than sixty books spanning novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, children’s literature, and graphic novels, and has been called “one of the sharpest and most imaginative novelists writing in English”. She is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice: for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for her 2019 follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments.
Margaret was born in Ottawa in November 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, the second of three children to Carl Atwood, an entomologist. During her early life, she would spend the warmer months in the remote forests of northern Quebec and Ontario where her father tracked insect infestations, and the winters in the city (first Ottawa, later Toronto). She didn’t attend school for a full year until the age of twelve.
Her childhood scribblings – a “novel” about an ant called Annie, a volume of rhyming poems about cats, and a play about a giant – turned into a more serious ambition to become a writer when Margaret was sixteen.
After studying English at the University of Toronto, where she began publishing poems in the college magazine, her first novel, The Edible Woman, came out in 1969, following five collections of poetry.
Her most famous work, The Handmaid’s Tale, was published in 1985 and depicted a dystopian vision of the United States as a patriarchal and totalitarian place called Gilead. Although it was written during the Reagan era, it has become eerily relevant again in the wake of the election of Donald Trump.
Margaret lost her life partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019. She lives in Toronto.
DISC ONE: Anchors Aweigh - US Navy Band DISC TWO: Hearts of Stone - The Charms DISC THREE: Offenbach: Les contes d'Hoffmann, Giulietta Act: Barcarolle. Belle nuit, ô nuit d'amour. Performed by Joan Sutherland (soprano) Huguette Tourangeau (soprano), Plácido Domingo (tenor), Andre Neury (bass), Pro Arte Choir, Lausanne, Choeur Du Brassus, Choeur de la Radio Suisse Romande, Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, conducted by Richard Bonynge DISC FOUR: Four Strong Winds - Ian & Sylvia DISC FIVE: Barrett’s Privateers - Stan Rogers DISC SIX: The Handmaid's Tale, Act I Scene 6: The Doctor. Composed by Poul Ruders and performed by Marianne Rorholm, Hanne Fischer (Mezzo-sopranos), Royal Danish Opera Chorus and Royal Danish Orchestra, conducted by Michael Schønwandt DISC SEVEN: We Praise the Tiny Perfect Moles - Orville Stoeber DISC EIGHT: Symphony No. 6 in F Major, Op. 68 "Pastoral": II. Scene am Bach. Andante molto moto. Composed by Beethoven and performed by Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Otto Klemperer
BOOK CHOICE: How to Survive on a Desert Island by Samantha Bell LUXURY ITEM: A knife and matchbox CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Hearts of Stone - The Charms
Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor