Margaret Atwood

Please note, the waiting list for this event is extremely long.

Margaret Atwood is renowned as one of the most gifted storytellers in the world.

The author of more than fifty award-winning books of fiction, poetry and critical essays, whose novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, a global number one bestseller and a joint winner of the Man Booker Prize.

In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade, and in 2022 Burning Questions, a collection of essays, was a Sunday Times bestseller. Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. Alongside being a writer of international acclaim, her extraordinary life has seen her worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer.

And now, the literary phenomenon herself joins us in Bath to celebrate and discuss Old Babes in the Wood, a dazzling collection of fifteen newly-published stories that explore the full warp and weft of experience.

From two best friends disagreeing about their shared past, to the right way to stop someone from choking; from a daughter determining if her mother really is a witch, to what to do with inherited relics such as World War II parade swords.

They feature beloved cats, a confused snail, Martha Gellhorn, George Orwell, philosopher-astronomer-mathematician Hypatia of Alexandria, a cabal of elderly female academics, and an alien tasked with retelling human fairy tales.

At the heart of the collection is a stunning sequence that follows a married couple as they travel the road together, the moments big and small that make up a long life of love -- and what comes after.

The glorious range of Atwood's creativity and humanity is on full beam in these tales, which by turns delight, illuminate and quietly devastate.