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The Indiana Daily Student

arts

Margaret Atwood to come to IU

Novelist Margaret Atwood is coming to IU this February.

Atwood will be speaking, giving a public reading and interacting with the IU and Bloomington communities while she is on campus, according to a University press release.

IU English professor Ed Comentale, interim director of the College Arts and Humanities Institute, is ?sponsoring Atwood’s visit.

“Margaret Atwood has been a guiding literary light for nearly five decades,” Comentale said in the release. “She first became famous for her fearless writings about gender and power, and now she’s inspired a whole new generation of readers with her fantastic tales of dystopia.”

Atwood’s work will also be displayed at the Lilly Library in an exhibit titled “The Speculative Worlds of Margaret Atwood” during her visit, according to the University. The exhibition will run from Jan. 28 to ?Feb. 20.

Atwood has received several awards, including a Booker Prize, and has authored more than 40 volumes of poetry, children’s literature, fiction and nonfiction, according to the University.

Some of her best-known novels include “The Blind Assassin” and “The ?Edible Woman.”

Her Twitter account also boasts more than 600,000 followers, according to the release.

“We’re lucky to be following along as she tackles some of the planet’s biggest issues: environmental instability, overpopulation, terrorism, human rights, genetic manipulation — the list goes on and on,” Comentale said in the release. “She’s a hero, and her visit to campus is a fan’s dream.”

A one-day conference on her writing and a film screening at the IU Cinema of the film adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” will also be shown at 6:30 on Feb. 1, ?according to the University.

Associate English Professor Monique Morgan will lead the Feb. 3 discussion with Atwood at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, according to the press release.

“Margaret Atwood is a novelist, poet, short story writer and essayist who unflinchingly portrays personal failings, social injustice and ecological devastation while offering hope for change and redemption,” Morgan said in the release. “In her most recent trilogy of speculative novels set in the near future, Atwood — to paraphrase one of her characters — dreams bad things so that we won’t have to.”

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