A situation, she explained in the lecture, that leads to civil chaos. (“They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics at the time”, the novel’s narrator explains.) The second deals with a world in which the planet’s resources are severely depleted. The first describes an America transformed into a theocracy that treats women as mere childbearing chattels – after a state of emergency is declared following an assassination. At least nine Bangladeshi activists, writers and intellectuals have been murdered since the beginning of last year.Ītwood’s PEN Pinter prize lecture, titled An Improvisation on the Theme of Rights, which she also delivered on Thursday, ends with a reflection on the dystopias of her fiction: that of The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and of her recent MaddAddam trilogy. She will also bestow one, too, on Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, the Bangladeshi publisher of remarkable courage known as Tutul, who last year survived, in his Dhaka office, a machete-and-gun attack by Islamic extremists. We are speaking at the British Library, where, later that day, the 76-year-old author will receive a different award: the English PEN Pinter prize. If Atwood herself occasionally checks her phone for missed calls from Stockholm on such mornings, she does not admit to it in any case, fellow Canadian Alice Munro’s victory in 2013, commemorated with a generous tribute by Atwood in this paper, will have queered that particular pitch for some years to come. “For what?” she says, aspirating the word “what” with devastating effect.

Margaret atwood the tempest