Author Margaret Atwood to Speak At UMass Amherst

Oct. 22, 2008

Contact:

Daniel J. Fitzgibbons 413/545-0444

Novelist to give English department’s annual Troy Lecture Nov. 6

AMHERST, Mass. – Author Margaret Atwood will present the annual Troy Lecture on the Humanities and Public Life at the University of Massachusetts Amherst on Thursday, Nov. 6 at 4:30 p.m. in the Fine Arts Center Concert Hall.

The talk is titled “A Precision of Language: An Evening with Margaret Atwood.”

Atwood is an international literary star. In her thematically diverse and best-selling novels, she has anticipated, explored—and even changed—the popular preoccupations of our time. Writing about issues on both a personal and worldly scale with a knife-edge precision, Atwood has been called “one of the most inventive, enthralling and accomplished authors writing in English” by the Sunday Times.

Though Atwood’s subject matter may vary from book to book, the careful craftsmanship of her language—she is also a renowned poet—gives her considerable body of work a sensibility and resonance all its own. She is the rare writer whose books are adored by the public, acclaimed by the major critics and studied on university and college campuses. Those books include The Edible Woman, Surfacing, Lady Oracle, The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye, and Alias Grace.

In 2000, Atwood won the Booker Prize for The Blind Assassin, a book in which, according to John Updike, “scarcely a sentence of her quick, dry yet avid prose fails to do useful work, adding to a picture that becomes enormous.” Her latest releases are Oryx and Crake, a dark and witty look at ecological disaster; The Penelopiad, a dazzling first-person retelling of the myth of Penelope, from Homer’s Odyssey; The Tent, a new collection of mini-fictions; and Moral Disorder, a novel-in-short-stories, which explores a single family over the course of 60 years.

Atwood’s books have been translated into more than 30 languages and she has received many international awards, including the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada; the Booker Prize and The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence in the United Kingdom; the Dashiell Hammett Award in the United States, and the Le Chevalier dans l’Ordre de Arts et Les Lettres in France. Atwood lives and writes in Toronto.

The Troy Lectures are presented in honor of the late Frederick S. (Barney) Troy, professor emeritus of English, honorary professor of the university and former trustee.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Doors will open at 4 p.m. For further information, call 413/545-4339.

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