Margaret Atwood, Author HARDtalk

There are writers of world renown whose reputation rests

There are others who write more prolifically but always

Margaret Atwood's output fizzes with energy,

She's best known for her novels The Handmaid's Tale,

The Blind Assassin and Oryx and Crake.

But she's written poetry, blog fiction and in 2016

So what keeps her creative juices flowing?

Margaret Atwood, welcome to HARDtalk.

I have just referred to your prolific output, diverse output over

so many years but you've just done something you've never done before,

you've taken on adapting Shakespeare and you've always Shakespeare is

pretty much your favourite author, so daunting was that? Very, very

daunting. First of all, you knew that you are going to get a lot of

people saying that you shouldn't do it and you can't improve on

Shakespeare et cetera et cetera. And second because I took on The Tempest

and that has a whole slew problems of its own. The brief was very

broad, so it was, choose a play and do whatever as long as it is a

novel. And I mean you have created this wonderfully sort of imaginative

new take where it is thought all set in a prison, Prospero becomes the

guy who is sort of a theatre manager who is thwarted in his career and

then goes back to the prison to produce a drama, there is a play

within a play, there is a lot of music and dance, it is pretty

extraordinary because it is so imaginative and yet as you say all

anchored you know in a story hundreds of years old. Yes, well, I

have to have something in the novel in each case that corresponded to

all of the elements that were in The Tempest. Some of the people in the

Hogarth Shakespeare series took a much broader approach and didn't do

that but I felt that this is the one play in which Shakespeare is writing

about something he did all the time, it is what he did for a living, he

was a director, producer, probably sometimes actor and manager of a

theatre company. That was his thing. And The Tempest is about a director

who is not seen by the actors working with the special effects

guy, namely Arakl putting on a plate, -- aerial. Putting on a play.

Make me a pretend Tempest. OK, done. That is what a special effects guy

would do. So here is this play going on, which is The Tempest, and within

it there is another plate, which is the Mask of the three Godesses, and

there is Prospero, I'm seen as a director is, doing the stuff behind,

and the special effects guy is also invisible. As you say, you are not

the only author who has been commissioned to sort of do these...

There is eight altogether. Updated Shakespeare stories. I just wonder,

what do you think it is about Shakespeare that, you know, if one

thinks about artistic creation as evolutionary, you know, he has

survived, he has proved to be the fittest of all the fittest in terms

of the longevity of his work. Why? First of all, he is very good.

LAUGHTER yes, but what does very good mean, what is so very good

about his work? OK, he does have something for everyone. So he is

very different from the French classical drama of roughly the same

period, which was for a rest at rates. And they wanted the unity,

they wanted elevated language for everybody. He mixes them up. So the

posh people in Shakespeare speak posh language and the clowns,

plebeians and ditch diggers speak vulgar language and make dirty

jokes. And his audience was very diverse. It was everybody. There

were expensive seats for people who wanted to pay more money but there

were also cheap seats. I love that answer, because I am going to make a

handbrake turn or a lurch to some of the other things you do right now in

your writing, because you just talk about Shakespeare's ability to reach

out to so many different groups and to use diversity as a tool in his

armoury. It seems to me you do just the same thing. Because if I reflect

on the way you produce now, you have embraced the Internet, you have

embraced blog fiction, you tweet like crazy and use that as a tool

for some of your thinking and your take on life. You've got 1.3 million

Twitter followers. Has it been very important for you to sort of utilise

every available technology? I think I am just a curious pen monkey.

That's a quote from a guy who has a blog called Terrible Minds. Because

writers can monkeys and I think that's very good. Chuck Wendy, you

can follow him on Twitter. He has some good advice for writers.

Anyway, so it's not so much that I embraced things, I like to try them

out to see what they are. So it is curious pen monkey. I will try

anything once. I have gone on a carnival ride called the Mighty

Mouse. I'll never do it again. It was horrible. But I've done it once.

So I tried all of these things... You never stop trying. This for

example, I believe... Your publisher has said you should publish it as a

traditional book. It started as a serial. So I've always been

interested in serial writing because of course the 19th century did it a

lot. Early Charles Dickens novels, he wrote them in instalments. So

this book, The Heart Goes Last, is it written in a different way,

stylistically, is it different because it began as blog fiction? It

is now because I pick it apart and put it altogether. In the next

instalment you have to remind people what they just read if you do that

in a bookity book book it would get very annoying. I took out the bits

where I was reminding them about what happened before. Now, maybe it

is for you to argue about but it seems to me your best-known novel is

the Handmaid's Tale. That is true but remember how old it is. Well,

that is exactly what I want to get to. It has had a lot of time to

become well known. When I talk about the evolution of creativity and

those that you know, survive, one has to assume, are the best. You

can't assume that. Can't you? No. Do you feel that with the Handmaid's

Tale, its longevity, my daughter for example adores the book and she is

18. I mean, do you see that as a sign of its quality or something

else? It can be either one but there are only for arrangements of quality

and fame. -- four arrangements. Good books that are successful. Good

books that are not successful. Bad books that are successful and bad

books that are not successful. Why are some good books not successful,

do you think? I don't know, sometimes they are successful later,

like painters. You know, painters who have not done very well in their

lifetime and then become hugely successful, like van Gogh. I think

the Handmaid's Tale, it is two reasons, number one, the religious

right in the United States has not faded away. And for those who

haven't read it, you wrote it in the mid- '80s at a time when the sort of

Christian conservative movement was taking off in the US, the so-called

moral majority and all of that, and you clearly, you looked at that and

you extrapolated to what a society might look like if these guys with

their sort of take on biblical fundamentalism had their way, and it

was a pretty dystopian vision. Well, you may not get the costumes as

such. I got the costume of the old Dutch package. For people who don't

know, the handmaids in your story, where women are, fired at our

receptacles for childbearing and all of that, the handmaids in question,

they wear at a red card and they are easily identifiable. Yes. You don't

have to go far back in rest in history to find the same... -- red

garb. Here is my question, to do with a point about describing The

Handmaid's Tale as speculative fiction. There you were in the mid-

80s speculating like mad about what society might look like if the moral

majority took over. We are more than 30 years later now. Do you now look

back and think, well, I was a bit sort of too worried, I got a bit

carried away or not? I don't think I was worried enough. LAUGHTER.

Yeah, I think if you look at state by state, some of the laws they are

putting in right now, you know, I probably wasn't, I wasn't quite

worried enough. The Handmaid's Tale has become a meme in US politics and

you'll find it turning up on Twitter, somebody needs to tell the

Republicans the Handmaid's Tale is not a blueprint. And when you hear

Donald Trump talking about women... ? Donald Trump is in a category of

his own. Number one, he is a throwback to sort of mashers in the

50s. If we can put it that way. LAUGHTER.

He is not religious in any way. He's pretending to be. But he is

certainly not a true believer. A lot of women in America might regard him

as a misogynist. That's a different thing. Of course. You can be

misogynist as all get out without being a true believer. I suppose

what I'm getting at is The Handmaid's Tale raises all sorts of

questions about gender equality, about relationships between men and

women. Absolutely but what I really see it as is the totalitarianism

told from the point of view of a woman. And, you know, in an

even-steven sort of what you might call feminist universe, all of the

men would have more power than all of the women - that is not the case

here. The women at the top have more power than the men at the bottom. So

it is a true pyramid which is what totalitarianisms are. May I get a

little personal with you about some of your own motivation. Personal...

LAUGHTER. You are Canadian. No kidding!

LAUGHTER. How can you tell? You know, I can

tell. The Handmaid's Tale is, it is set in a sort of mythical land which

really is the eastern seaboard of the United States of America called

renamed Gyliad. It is really Cambridge, Massachusetts and all the

buildings are really there. Are you a Canadian who quite like a lot of

Canadians looks at the United States and things, my God, we are so much

more civilised and progressive than they are? No, I don't think that.

Why? I have lived there. Number two, we've lived in Canada and we have

some nasty skeletons in our own closet, some of which are coming out

right now. We are unlikely to get a totalitarian theocracy simply

because we are too diverse. You need about 30% of any population to get a

really good totalitarianism going. And probably it wouldn't be Canada.

Isn't that true of the US as well? And yet you speculated about a

totalitarianism in the US. They've got 30%, that's just it. Looking at

the numbers, they probably have a bit more than 30%. And I do put into

The Handmaid's Tale, what you need is some catastrophic event of either

an economic kind or an environmental kind or both because they are joined

at the hip to get people really scared. And that's when you can get

a coup going and take over a country. Interesting you talk about

the environmental concerns. Would it be true to say that in your own life

over recent years that the thing that has motivated you most, got you

campaigning loudest and longest, has been your concern for the

environment and climate change? I'm just thinking again about Canada.

Canada is one of the biggest oil producers in the world and I just

come back on HARDtalk from a long trip on the Thai sounds of Alberta.

And did that frighten you? It fascinated me. Here you have a young

Prime Minister, Mr Trudeau, who says, well, he has indeed signed up

to the Paris Climate Change Agreement, he said he is going to

cut Canada's emissions by 30% and yet at the very same time he is

supporting the expansion of the Tar sands and clearly within decade you

are going to be if not the biggest but the second biggest oil producer

in the world if current trends continue. Maybe, maybe not, I don't

think he's supported the expansion of the sands of such party supported

a pipeline. Some would say that. The two go together. There is some

debate possible. Do you worry about Canada? I worry all the time about

everything. Next in. So if you are going to do that,

if you are going to continue with the carbon fuels,

you have to think of other ways in which you can cut emissions

or absorb carbon, and they are going to have to start thinking

about that really fast. When you talk about these

issues inside Canada, I just wonder how Canadians react

to you, do you feel at one with your people,

or somewhat out of sync. There isn't a people,

there are these people And these other people over here

and those other people over there. So if we are talking about mowing

through indigenous people's rights in order to do

this stuff, I would be If we are talking about,

we have to shut down all consumption and production of oil immediately,

that's actually just not practical. I think at one with my people,

I think most "my people" would accept both of those points of view,

or at least 80% of them would. Let me bring you back

to writing and creativity. You have said that you always

place your stories and imaginative Although some people call

you a science-fiction writer, It depends how you are going

to define it. If you wanted to take science

fiction as a great big umbrella that includes things like Frankenstein

and zombies then sure. We are all writing wonder tales

in that area. But if you want to translate

the genealogy of two different kinds of those tales, number one

the Jules Verne line, he thought he was writing

about things that really could happen, and a number

of his things really did Or on the other hand, HG Wells,

about whom Jules Verne said in horror "But he's

making things up!" So that gives us science-fiction,

the Time Machine, the War of the Worlds leads

to the sci-fi on other planets Only because I'm not good

at writing the other stuff. Because you have now in this last

year put together with a wonderful illustrator a comic book

which of course is pure So you are not positing

a future, you are just I am writing a comic book,

of the superhero kind. Sorry to disappoint

you, but actually no. Your character is way

more interesting. Let me get this straight,

it's a man who, through a series of events, becomes half

owl, half cat. I'm just thinking to myself,

what possessed you? OK, if you look at it very closely,

you will see that it's connected with a parallel programme

which is called www.catsandbirds.ca. And that is run by Nature Canada,

and it addresses the very serious problem of the precipitous decline

in North American, particularly migratory, birds, both species

and numbers within species. There are four horsepersons

of the apocalypse in that scenario. One is glass window strikes,

one is poisoning, one is habitat loss and one is predation by cats,

which are out of control. But you cannot tell the cat

people cats are bad, you must flush your cats

down the toilet. Yes, I have been a cat person

for thousands of years. How better than through a superhero

who is part cat, part bird? So how much fun is it writing

a superhero comic book? I cannot tell you how much fun

I've had. If you are not having

fun, then what is it? You remember how much

we didn't like that. You just strike me as such

an interesting mix of things. There is a lot of humour

in your books, even when they are quite dark,

and you do appear to be somebody And yet you are campaigning,

and you've talked about conservation, cats and birds,

big oil, fossil fuel, There is one other thing I want to

talk to you about which is your very passionate challenge to the Canadian

government over this legislation, C51, which you say is a fundamental

threat to freedom of speech. It is a throwback to the

Inquisition. So when last did we have a situation

where people who you don't even know who they are,

can testify against you and you have Some Canadians might say when last

did we face the sort of security threats that come out

of jihadi terror? We have to respond to

the world we live in. Well, it's not that there

shouldn't be any supervision, it's not that there shouldn't be any

care taken with these things, but the structure of C51

is what is at issue here. Nobody is saying we shouldn't have

any intelligence people, But should they have ultimate

control over your lives such as that maybe one of them has a grudge

against you because you slept with his wife, he can

frame you, big-time? And you will never

find out who did it. I just wonder, we've talked

about the way you have impressed technology,

and you are something of a sort of futurologist in that

you love to speculate I just wonder whether you are very

worried about things like artificial intelligence,

you know, the pervasive All the different ways

in which technology is changing I'm not very worried on my behalf

because I'm going to In previous books you speculated

about what's going to happen Paint me a picture of human society

in the rich world OK, so there is no 'the future',

there isn't any one the future. There are an infinite number

of possible futures, and as Donald Rumsfeld said,

it was probably about the only thing he said that I agree with,

it is the unknown So we don't know what the unknown

unknowns are because But leaving them aside,

should we continue down the road that we are on,

the biggest threat to us as a species would be

the death of the oceans. The reason that is the biggest

threat for us is because we are not 60-80% of the oxygen we breathe

is created by marine algae. As it was created in the beginning,

this did not used to be So kill the oceans,

we will choke to death. You have reflected a lot

on what is in here, what makes us human and motivates us,

most recently in rewriting The Tempest because that

is in a sense is what We need to get more

motivated politically. There are a large number

of organisations working One thing I would like to do before

I kick the bucket is put together a group of sci-fi writers

who are often very inventive thinkers, to just noodle around

these problems and see I've got somebody that's

helping me do that. The question is who are

we going to do it with? Are we going to do it

with the government, with some private companies,

are we just going Well, we will wait for

that to happen and get We have seen a lot of showers

earlier on in the night, and some nasty thunderstorms around

the Irish Sea as well. We start off at least

on quite a showery note. After Monday, it turns

noticeably chillier. And, as the winds become lighter,

there is the risk of some patchy fog