Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004–2021
About this audiobook
Brought to you by Penguin.
From cultural icon Margaret Atwood comes a brilliant collection of essays -- funny, erudite, endlessly curious, uncannily prescient -- which seek answers to Burning Questions such as:
Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?
How much of yourself can you give away without evaporating?
How can we live on our planet?
Is it true? And is it fair?
What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?
In over fifty pieces Atwood aims her prodigious intellect and impish humour at the world, and reports back to us on what she finds. This roller-coaster period brought the end of history, a financial crash, the rise of Trump and a pandemic. From debt to tech, the climate crisis to freedom; from when to dispense advice to the young (answer: only when asked) to how to define granola, we have no better guide to the many and varied mysteries of our universe.
Read by: Amanda Cordner, Amelia Sargisson, Ann Dowd, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Becky Hardie, Ciarán Hinds, Claudia Dey, Damian Rogers, Dr. Asha de Vos, Dr. Vincent Lam, Esi Edugya, Georgia Toews, Heather O'Neill, Ian Davidson, Kaniehtiio Horn, Katie Ryerson, Kelly McCormack, Lee Boudreaux, Lorna Crozier, Margaret Atwood, Marie Henein, Megan Follows, Naomi Alderman, Omar El-Akkad, Patricia Zurita, R.H. Thomson, Rebecca Liddiard, Robyn Doolittle, Stephanie Belding, Stephen Ouimette, Tess Degenstein, Tiffany Ayalik, Tomson Highway, Tori Dunlap, Yasmeen Hassan, Yvonne Boyer
© Margaret Atwood 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
About the author
Margaret Atwood (Author)
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and shared the Booker Prize. Her most recent publications are the poetry collections Dearly and Paper Boat; Burning Questions, a selection of essays; and Old Babes in the Wood, a volume of short stories.
Atwood is a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour, and has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
Ann-Marie Macdonald (Reader)
Ann-Marie MacDonald is a writer and actress. Fall on Your Knees won the 1997 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book. Her play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) won Canada's Governor General's Award and has had more than fifty productions world-wide. Other works for the theatre include The Arab's Mouth and the libretto for the internationally acclaimed chamber opera, Nigredo Hotel. She has acted in many plays, television dramas and feature films, including Where the Spirit Lives and I've Heard the Mermaids Singing. She lives in Toronto.
Naomi Alderman (Reader)
Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.
