Margaret Atwood to come out with new poetry collection in November

Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood will come out in November with her first poetry collection in over a decade, writing about bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present.

Titled "Dearly", the book will be published by Chatto & Windus, a part of the Vintage division of Penguin Random House UK.

By turns moving, playful and wise, these poems are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals, the publisher said.

Werewolves, sirens, aliens and dreams make their appearance in the poems, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment.

 

Becky Hardie, deputy publishing director at Chatto & Windus, says, "Every poem in 'Dearly' rings with all Margaret Atwood's characteristic curiosity and energy. It is a pure delight which stretches heart and mind. We are so proud to welcome her to Chatto's poetry list with this new collection, and look forward to sharing it with her many fans."

Hardie acquired rights for "Dearly" from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown and will publish simultaneously with McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Ecco in the US.

Penguin Random House Canada will also be producing the audiobook of "Dearly", which will be narrated by Atwood herself and released simultaneously with the print edition.

Atwood is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. She established herself as a poet in the 1960s with two prize-winning collections, "Double Persephone" and "The Circle Game".

Since then she has published a further fourteen books of poems, most recently "The Door" in 1997.

The Canadian author's novels include "Cat's Eye", "The Robber Bride", "Alias Grace", "The Blind Assassin" and the "MaddAddam" trilogy.

Her 1985 classic, "The Handmaid's Tale", went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series.

Its sequel, "The Testaments", was published in 2019 and was a global number-one bestseller and won the Booker Prize.