@thetimes: The novelist Margaret Atwood has been chilling readers and confounding interviewers for more than half a century, and thoroughly enjoying it. At 86 she is now a grande dame of literature — “Everyone’s nice to me now, because they want to get their niceness in before I die” — but niceness has never been Atwood’s concern. Her life and career have been characterised by steely indifference to expectations of feminine agreeability. “God,” as she says, with another beady glint, “made the middle finger for a reason.” The Handmaid’s Tale author speaks to Decca Aitkenhead, the chief interviewer of The Sunday Times, about gender wars, trade wars, assisted dying and the power of not playing nice. 📸 Sasha Onyschchenko #news #margaretatwood #thehandmaidstale #BookTok #literature

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Sunday 13 September 2026 16:00:00 GMT