Margaret Atwood

MARGARET ATWOOD

While her new novel takes place on a barren future Earth obliterated by science and technology, Margaret Atwood conceived of Oryx and Crake in the Australian monsoon rainforest of Arnheimland. In between stops on a book tour, the author examined caves inhabited by ancient Aboriginals and indulged her passion for bird watching. Admiring a group of red-necked crakes, Atwood suddenly envisioned her eleventh novel in vivid detail. She'd planned on pausing before writing a follow-up to Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin, but "when a story appears to you with such insistence you can't postpone it," she said at her publisher's website. She began to write amidst her continuing travels, completing several chapters on an Arctic cruise. In a Toronto airport on September 11, Atwood briefly halted the project when world events seemed to confirm her manuscript's darkest fears. "It's deeply unsettling when you're writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens."

Yet Atwood had been collecting disturbing clips from the newspapers for years, slowly forming the apocalyptic predictions of Oryx --cloning, genetic engineering, global warming, violence-inducing media. "Trends derided as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities," she observed.

The resulting saga follows Snowman, the apparent sole human survivor of a mysterious Armageddon, one triggered by ecological and scientific disaster. Surrounded by such menacing test-tube atrocities as "pigoons," "wolvdogs" and humanoids known as Crakers, Snowman barely scrapes by, as Atwood relays the catastrophic origins of this bleak future world. Booklist calls the effort "rigorous in its chilling insights and riveting in its fast-paced 'what if' dramatization . . . brilliantly provovactive as it is profoundly engaging."

Oryx is a companion of sorts to one of Atwood's trademark works, The Handmaid's Tale, also a disturbing work of speculative, dystopian fiction which "invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent." As Handmaid addressed her lifelong feminist concerns, Oryx calls upon Atwood's family legacy of science.

She was born in Ottawa in 1939; her father was a forest entomologist, and she spent her early childhood in the wilderness of northern Quebec. With several other scientist relatives, "the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is [still] likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice." At age six, she began writing "poems, morality plays, comic books and an unfinished novel about an ant." Proficient in literature as well as science, Atwood "could have gone either way" professionally, and points out that "science and fiction both begin with similar questions: what if? Why? How does it all work? But they focus on different areas of life on earth."

With a talent for both prose and poetry, she studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto, graduating in 1961. Since then, she's published over thirty volumes of poetry, essays and fiction, including The Edible Woman, Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, and two children's books, released in almost forty countries. The inaugural winner of the London Literary Prize, she also received the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature in the U.S., and Le Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts des Lettres in France. In the 1980s, she served as vice-chairman of the Writers Union of Canada and president of International P.E.N. Canadian Centre. A dedicated academic who's taught and lectured at institutions throughout the world, Atwood lives in Toronto with novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has three grown children.