Margaret Atwood: Fear is her forte

'The Handmaid's Tale' - now an opera - was seen as a salvo in the 1980s gender wars. Now it seems worryingly prophetic. Its author has made a similar journey from feminist heroine to chronicler of all our nightmares

All writers of genius – Swift, Orwell, Scott Fitzgerald – have something of the seer about them. When Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale was published in 1985 it was perceived as a feminist account of the gender war. Now, post-Khomeini, post-Waco, post-Taliban, and in the thick of the Bush era, it seems extraordinarily prophetic, a foretelling of the age of religious fundamentalism and authoritarianism.

Thursday night's British premiere at the London Coliseum of the Poul Ruders opera based on the novel – an account of a future in which America is run by a right-wing puritan regime which controls fertility and knowledge – offered the audience violence, sex, public hangings, and fear. Women are the possessions of men and are coerced into breeding for the childless. It was a chilling rendition of the human condition. In the worlds that Atwood creates, there is often fear – fear of the bully, fear of the unknown, fear of pain and loss. And above all, there is the loss of certainties. In Oryx and Crake, her first novel since the Booker prize-winner, The Blind Assassin, and due out here in three weeks, one of the certainties that has gone is time. No hour, no day, no week – all are lost. Everything is left to what Atwood herself once called The Goddess of Chance.

And yet Atwood never left her life to fate. From an early age, she determined to master her destiny. Her vocation was writing, from scribbling notes and stories as a child, to poetry, literary criticism and novels. It has been an astonishingly successful one, with frequent forays into the bestseller lists and a mantelpiece crammed with awards: Governor Generals from her native Canada, and then the Booker last year after being shortlisted four times.

It is a craft Atwood takes very seriously, meticulously writing and rewriting and making deft use of technical and scientific knowledge. As her novels become more complex in both structure and subject matter – Oryx and Crake, again set in the future, reveals the full horror of cloning – she now uses a team of researchers to help her with the science, abandoning the ring binders of press clippings she once used as research.

But for Atwood, writing is above all a calling, even a mystical experience, something she cannot avoid. "I didn't choose to write about this subject," she told me once of her novel, Alias Grace. "It chose me. In a hotel room in Zurich. There it was." Writers, she explained in Negotiating with the Dead, her essays on writing published last year, go into the dark, descending to the underworld, to find what all writers need: stories. But, she warns, it is much harder to come back with the goods. Come back though, she has, time and time again. She is, says Peter Florence, organiser of the Hay Literary Festival, a woman of spectacular gifts. "Alongside Updike and Mailer," he said, "she is the greatest living writer not to have won the Nobel Prize."

Atwood was born in Canada in 1939. Her father was a biologist and her mother a housewife and speed skater. Part of her childhood was spent in northern Quebec where her father ran a research station studying forest insects. "At the age of six months, I was carried into the woods in a packsack, and this landscape became my hometown," she recalls. She relished the common ingredients of a writer's childhood: books and solitude. "My mother," she says, "liked quietness in children and a child who is reading is very quiet."

The entymology of the forest left a profound impression on her. Bugs, germs and ants, occur throughout her work, as if she desires a forensic cleanliness. "Faulkner was my idea of what could be possible for – well, myself, as a writer [which was what I wanted to be]" she once wrote, "hysteria in steaming, bug-infested swamps being my notion of artistic verisimilitude. I knew those bugs. I knew those swamps, or swamps very like them."

By nine, she was creating tiny handmade books as a way of earning Brownie badges. At school she announced she was to be a writer, and after English at the University of Toronto, and a PhD in 19th-century literature at Harvard, she started writing poetry. There is a gritty, crackly film of her in the Fifties, reciting her poetry alongside Leonard Cohen, one the voice from sensible, stable Toronto, the other the declaimer from the more exotic, edgy Montreal.

Montreal might have had glamour, but the rest of Canada then was as staid as its reputation, and its writers – Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies, Mavis Gallant, went abroad to escape it. Atwood, after Harvard, returned and stayed put. In 1967 she married an American writer, James Polk, but the marriage lasted only five years. She has spent the past 30 years with Graeme Gibson, another writer. Both work at home, writing in separate rooms at their house in Toronto. Many of her books are dedicated to Gibson and their only child, Jess.

Many writers give her credit for transforming Canadian writing, helping to give other novelists and poets a new confidence in their country and their culture. It was no longer just America's attic. Kate Pullinger, a fellow Canadian novelist, says that Atwood was the pioneer for Canadian writing, helping to pave the way for others such as Carol Shields, Michael Ondaatje and Alice Munro to gain recognition in Europe and America. "She is a very literary writer and made a huge impact. If it had not been for her, others would not have been able to be accepted."

Canada also informed Atwood's writing, from the layers of its history enhancing her own sense of identity to its wide open spaces and its wilderness where she spent her childhood, steeping her novels in a sense of otherness.

Early Seventies novels such as The Edible Woman, one of the first examinations of anorexia, saw her taken up by the feminist movement. Rosie Boycott, critic and founder of Spare Rib, the feminist magazine, sees Atwood as highly significant. "She is a very courageous writer and has moved women's writing on. Some women take too small a slice of life but her books take a much bigger canvas, painting the big picture."

Although she has published literary criticism and poetry, she is best known for her novels. They display her versatility in both genre and subject matter. While the 1976 novel Lady Oracle was a bodice ripper, Gothic horror informed 1993's The Robber Bride, and Cat's Eye was a frightening account of childhood bullying.

While Atwood is a serious writer, her seriousness is tempered by irony, scepticism and a lightness of touch. But it is her wit above all that those who know her comment on. Xandra Bingley, a friend for more than 20 years, says she is always amused by Atwood's ironic take on the world. "We went to the opera once, and it was La Bohème and I got all weepy, when Mimi dies, and Margaret just said: "now I remember why I didn't want to be poor."

And poor she isn't. She draws huge numbers to her readings and other appearances. Her books sell in huge numbers. In Britain The Blind Assassin sold 100,000 copies in five weeks. The novel, a collage of newspaper cuttings, crime thriller, pulp fiction spoof, and family history, has characters telling stories to help them make sense of their lives.

Margaret Atwood, says Peter Florence, is the kind of novelist who helps readers make sense of their lives. "She's exacting, and demanding, but she repays it. She's changed their lives and how they see the world."