Margaret Atwood: Prize Her Alive

Congratulations to Margaret Atwood for being named the winner of an international prize awarded by the Dayton Literary Peace Prize foundation that the Guardian characterized as “a lifetime  achievement award that celebrates literature’s power to foster peace, social justice and global understanding.”

It’s a good start towards this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. There’s no one else who deserves it more, and this should be her year, especially with the publication of The Testaments, her sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, which has hit the best seller lists again and is now the source for an internationally successful television series.

 I’ve promoted her for the Nobel before, and each year has added to the logic. Her novels (with the mix of here and now naturalism and maybe pretty soon speculation), books of poems, nonfiction on literary themes, as well as graphic novels, contributions to associated dramatic and musical works, and her active and creative participation in various digital forms form a unique body of work. She is a deeply literary writer (and literary scholar), and equally engaged in the defining issues of the times through her work as well as outside it, which is pretty much the description of an ideal Nobel laureate.

 I must also admit that I’ve come to depend on her company in my pandemic sequestration, partly through reading but also to a large extent through YouTube videos of her interviews and appearances. At 80 years old she talks from a perspective slightly longer in years than mine, and those few years are crucial because she has childhood memories of life during World War II, a period I just missed but felt as a phantom in the lives of my parents and others.

Her background is fascinating and pretty different from mine, though her early schools sound familiar—apparently 1950s Canadian schools and 1950s Catholic schools in the US had a lot in common. She speaks from her perspective in a way that I (at 74) understand and appreciate. She is a great talker and has an impish sense of humor. Glimpses of interviews from prior decades (particularly in this excellent UK documentary) suggest why she was considered a bit scary, but that wasn’t her problem, it was theirs.

Her perspective is large in other ways I appreciate.  She know a lot of literature--ancient, historical and contemporary. (She had the good fortune to study with the great Canadian literary critic, Northrop Frye.)  She knows the important stories.  Thanks in part to growing up in the household of a working scientist with scientist friends, her perspective on the human race transcends society as novelists often treat it, and includes the biological, the species-level, notably in the MaddAddam series.

 Here is how she ends her statement on the Dayton Literary Peace Prize web site, with characteristic good sense and heart:

 "Writers are limited in their range – in what they are able to write about – whereas readers are not. Readers can read across the whole sweep of human experience – as far back in the past as they can see, as far afield as they can reach, as far into the future as it is possible to imagine. The closer we are to a person, the psychiatrists tell us, the harder it is to actually murder them. Perhaps that is the way in which reading is conducive to peace: it brings us closer together. If I feel I know you, understand you, and like you, why would I wish to make war on you? 

That, at any rate, is our hope. We could certainly use a little hope, right about now."