Life.Culture.Discovery.

Review | Burning Questions, Margaret Atwood’s third non-fiction collection, is funny, fluent, wide-ranging and occasionally urgent

Made up of ‘essays and occasional pieces’ composed between 2004 and 2021, Atwood’s collection spans everything from reviews to issues such as quarantine

She eulogises fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro, encounters a polar bear, watches birds with her late husband and nurses him through dementia

Reading Time:3 minutes

Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor Margaret Atwood, whose third non-fiction collection, Burning Questions, is out now. Photo: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images

Published: 7:15pm, 2 Apr 2022Updated: 10:02am, 3 Apr 2022

Burning Questions by Margaret Atwood, pub. Doubleday

Is there anything Margaret Atwood can’t do, at least as a writer? Her career, which now spans over 60 years, is dominated by her 17 novels, most famously The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Cat’s Eye (1988) and The Testaments (2019), but Atwood began her writing life as a poet (with Double Persephone; 1961), and has published almost as many volumes as novels.

Add in graphic novels and children’s books, and all that remains for her to do is write a play and a cookbook.

Burning Questions is Atwood’s third collection of non-fiction: the others being Second Words (compiling work between 1962 and 1980) and Moving Targets (1982-2004). As Atwood writes in the introduction, the material in each volume owes almost everything to circumstance (or commissions): the political temperature of each period (civil rights and feminism, communism and free market economics, terrorism, technology, and Trump), to Atwood’s personal life (was she teaching or freelance, famous or getting there, a parent caring for young children, or a parent caring for her partner with dementia).

This third volume is from a more revered and successful Margaret Atwood. This is Atwood (now 82), creator of superior binge-watch television (The Handmaid’s Tale), and Atwood, author of global phenomena (The Testaments). It is also Atwood, the widow. She lost Graeme Gibson, her partner of half a century, in 2019.