Margaret Atwood is set to publish her first collection of poetry in over a decade, an exploration of “absences and endings, ageing and retrospection” that will also feature werewolves, aliens and sirens.
After jointly winning the Booker prize with Bernardine Evaristo last year for her bestselling sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Atwood’s publisher said today that the 80-year-old Canadian author’s next book would be Dearly. Out in November, the collection will be Atwood’s first book of poetry since 2007’s The Door.
Chatto & Windus, which will publish Dearly, said it was “by turns moving, playful and wise”, exploring “bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present”. It will also feature “werewolves, sirens, aliens and dreams” as well as “various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment”, the publisher promised.
“Every poem in Dearly rings with all Margaret Atwood’s characteristic curiosity and energy,” said Chatto’s Becky Hardie. “It is a pure delight which stretches heart and mind.” Atwood, whose long-term partner Graeme Gibson died last year, will narrate the audiobook herself.
The author, who published her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961, was a poet before she became a novelist. She told the Guardian in 2003 that she realised at high school, while walking home across the football field, that she would be a writer: “I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that writing was the only thing I wanted to do.”
