Author Appearance: Margaret Atwood, Feb. 23 at SCAD Atlanta

Margaret Atwood will visit Atlanta on February 23 to discuss her latest novel, The Year of the Flood.

Margaret Atwood won the Man Booker Prize for the The The Blind Assassin in 2000. She has been on the short list for that prize five times since her breakthrough 1986 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. She also was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that her latest, The Year of the Flood, will make the 2010 short list when that is announced this summer (and surely repeated here).

The Year of the Flood focuses on a group called God’s Gardeners, a small community of survivors of the same environmental catastrophe depicted in Oryx and Crake. For this novel, Ms. Atwood collaborated with composer Orville Stoeber who wrote and produced an album of the God’s Gardeners’ hymns. The text and music highlight the fragility of the Earth’s environment and the adaptability of human nature.

Ms. Atwood’s lecture is Tuesday, Feb. 23, from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m. at SCAD Atlanta (Events Space, Fourth floor, Building C).