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In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”
In this Service95 Book Club interview hosted by Dua Lipa, Margaret Atwood talks about the research she conducted in order to imagine the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) while writing the novel in Berlin during the Cold War and how the current political landscape is reflective of the themes in her book.
In this video, Margaret Atwood, recipient of the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award speaks with Pádraig Ó Tuama about her literary career, the power and the craft of poetry, and how verse captures both personal and universal experiences.
Watch the book trailer for Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel (Harper, 2024) edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, a project from the Authors Guild in which each character living inside an imaginary New York City apartment building has been written by a different, well-known author. Read more about the book in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about grief, unburnable books, and her latest story collection, Old Babes in the Wood (Doubleday, 2023).
“There’s nothing in this book that hasn’t happened already,” says Margaret Atwood in this 1986 interview for the “Worth Quoting” series sponsored by Florida State College at Jacksonville, in which she discusses the release of her award-winning dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the historic and current events that influence her writing.
In this behind-the-scenes video, copies of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Testaments (Nan A. Talese, 2019), a sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, journey through the printing process.
“I’m still in awe of the range of stories and voices that they bring and the worlds that they open up. It’s an incredibly eclectic group.” In this video, Afua Hirsch and fellow members of the judging panel talk about the six books on the 2019 Booker Prize shortlist, which include The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, Quichotte by Salman Rushdie, and Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann.
“Each book has an individual, singular voice…some are very interior, some are very extravagant,” says Xiaolu Guo, one of the judges for the 2019 Booker Prize, about the thirteen titles nominated for the longlist of the prize. The “Booker Dozen” includes The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli, An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma, and Lanny by Max Porter.
“I’d like us not to be resigned but to be rebellious—I want to see science fiction step over the old walls and head right into the next wall and start to break it down too.” Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin is a crowdfunded documentary directed by Arwen Curry, who was able to collaborate with the late author before her death. The film features interviews with Le Guin, as well as authors including Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, and Theodora Goss.
