Multi-award winning author Margaret Atwood joins UEA today as a UNESCO City of Literature visiting professor. She will help students to develop their novel writing skills through a series of masterclasses and will appear at the university’s spring literary festival on Wednesday 26th February. She will also deliver UEA’s annual Sebald Lecture at the British Library on Tuesday 18th February. The UNESCO visiting professorship recognizes Norwich’s status as England’s first World City of Literature, joining Edinburgh, Melbourne, Iowa City, Dublin and Reykjavik. Margaret (pictured) is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her latest novel, ‘MaddAddam’, is the third in the trilogy that began with the 2003 Giller Prize-winner, ‘Oryx and Crake’, and continued with ‘The Year of the Flood’ (2009). Her other recent publications include the 2007 volume of poetry, ‘The Door’, and the 2011 collection of essays, ‘In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination’. She is the author of ‘The Blind Assassin’, which won the 2000 Booker Prize, and ‘Alias Grace’, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy. Her other novels include ‘The Robber Bride’, ‘Cat’s Eye’, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, and ‘The Penelopiad’. She lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson. UEA’s other UNESCO visiting professor this year is James Lasdun, following the appointment of Timberlake Wertenbaker and Ali Smith last year.
Margaret Atwood joins UEA as a UNESCO City of Literature professor
