Booker Prize-winning novelist Margaret Atwood to read at APSU on April 11

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. – There are books that people simply enjoy, and then there are books that cause a deep, visceral reaction in readers. Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” belongs in the latter category. The novel, about the repression of women in a future society, connected so strongly with its audience that, almost 30 years later, it remains an international bestseller and a major influence on people’s lives.

“People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ tattooed on them,” Atwood wrote in a 2012 editorial in The Guardian newspaper.

The now classic novel, which has been adapted into a movie, an opera and a ballet, solidified Atwood’s reputation as a leading literary figure of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, but she has continued to expand that reputation with novels such as “The Blind Assassin” and “Oryx and Crake.” Her latest book, the 2013 novel “MaddAddam,” was recently nominated for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction.

At 8 p.m. on April 11, Atwood will visit the Austin Peay State University Mabry Concert Hall for a special reading and book signing, sponsored by the APSU President’s Office and the APSU Department of Languages and Literature. The event is free and open to the public.

Atwood is the author of more than 40 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction and non-fiction. Her work has been published in more than 40 languages, and she is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction and the Canadian Booksellers’ Lifetime Achievement Award. Every fall, Atwood also is listed among the top contenders for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

For more information on her reading, contact Susan Wallace at wallacess@apsu.edu.