Things to do in West London:
Novelist and poet Margaret Atwood will discuss her lifelong engagement with the world of clothes in this forthcoming talk at the V & A. Atwood has often shown a keen sensitivity to the impact of fashion on all facets of social existence. In her short story Hair Jewellery, the narrator even claims to ‘resurrect’ herself through clothes: ‘it’s impossible for me to remember what I did, what happened to me, unless I can remember what I was wearing…every time I discard a sweater or a dress I am discarding a part of my life’. And in the dystopian
Handmaid’s Tale, a totalitarian government uses uniform as a means of maintaining a highly stratified social hierarchy: each different group is forced to wear a colour-coded outift. This talk therefore promises to give a fascinating insight into an important aspect of Atwood’s oeuvre.

Margaret Atwood biography:
Born in 1939, in Ottowa, Canada, Margaret Atwood decided to be a writer at the age of sixteen. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, was published in 1969. Since then she has maintained a prodigious output, publishing more than forty works of fiction (including The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize), non-fiction, children’s stories and poetry as well as trying her hand at writing television scripts and librettos. Aside from her literary pursuits, Atwood is a dedicated environmental campaigner and, appropriately for an author who is often placed in the science fiction camp, technology enthusiast: in the last ten years she has delved into the world of machines and pioneered ‘remote robotic writing technology’. She lives in Toronto with the novelist Graeme C. Gibson.

What	Margaret Atwood: Fashion and Fiction
Where	V&A, South Kensington, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL \| MAP
Nearest tube	South Kensington (underground)
When	On 13 Mar 15, 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Price	£9, conc £7
Website	Click here to book via the V&A

What the critics say

The Guardian

"What I admire in her novels is that, although subversion of genre is not uncommon these days, I think she does it in a very clever way: she makes the genre-busting stuff mirror the psychology of the characters. The genre she uses, and the way she subverts it, reflect aspects of those characters' own modes of constructing their reality or fictionalising their own existence."

New York Times

"Atwood has brought the previous two books together in a fitting and joyous conclusion that’s an epic not only of an imagined future but of our own past, an exposition of how oral storytelling traditions led to written ones and ultimately to our sense of origin."