Toronto’s 50 Most Influential: #32, Margaret Atwood
Our annual ranking of the people whose smarts, connections and clout are changing the city as we know it
Margaret Atwood
Novelist
32 At age 75, Atwood is more relevant than ever. She spent the year inveighing on Twitter against Stephen Harper and Bill C-51—but her biggest influence on the federal election came in August, when she wrote a scathing, hilarious op-ed for the right-leaning National Post about Stephen Harper’s obsession with Justin Trudeau’s hair. Hours later, the piece was mysteriously unpublished from the website, then republished with minor changes amid uproar from social media users who assumed the venerated author had been censored. (The Post later explained that the column had been pulled for “fact checking.”) On the fiction front, Atwood finished The Heart Goes Last, a biting, bestselling dystopian novel about a married couple who become part-time prison inmates in exchange for a middle-class lifestyle. Atwood is working on an adaptation of Shakspeare’s The Tempest, to be published by Hogarth.
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She contributed an original work to the Future Library in Oslo, where the sealed manuscript will be stored until 2114.
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