Not what you 'know;' what you 'feel'

“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.” – Margaret Atwood

Born on this date in 1939, Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, and environmental activist Atwood has been one of the world’s leading writers and thinkers for more than six decades.   She is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias Award for Literature, and has been shortlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize five times (winning once). While she’s perhaps best known for her novels – highlighted by her book The Handmaid’s Tale -- she’s also written 15 books of poetry and hundreds of essays, many of which are thoughtful and thought-provoking discussions on government and democracy.  Critics have called her a "scintillating wordsmith" and an "expert literary critic” in her own right. 

Also gifted with a keen scientific mind to compliment her writing skills, Atwood is credited with inventing the LongPen and the  associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents in ink anywhere in the world.  

And she’s a renowned university writing professor.                

  Her advice for students, “If you're waiting for the perfect moment, you'll never write a thing because it will never arrive. I have no routine. I have no foolproof anything. There's nothing foolproof.”

“Fiction is not necessarily about what you know, it's about how you feel. That,” she says, “is the truth about fiction,”

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