Be Brave Under Threat: Wise Words from Margaret Atwood, 2025 Winner of the British Book Awards’ Freedom to Publish Award

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Be Brave Under Threat: Wise Words from Margaret Atwood, 2025 Winner of the British Book Awards’ Freedom to Publish Award

 

By Melody E. McIntyre

 

As someone who grew up in Canada, I am, of course, familiar with Margaret Atwood. As one of Canada’s most prominent, well-known writers, Atwood has published 18 novels, 18 books of poetry, 11 works of non-fiction, plus multiple children’s books, short story collections, and other works. Her best known work is The Handmaid’s Tale, which has been adapted into a movie and a television show that just wrapped its final season in May 2025. Its sequel, The Testaments, released in 2019, won the Booker Prize. Throughout her career, Atwood has won many awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General’s Award, and, most recently, the Freedom to Publish Award during the 2025 British Book Awards on May 12, 2025. The British Book Awards are administered by the British trade magazine, The Bookseller, and have been handed out since 1990.

The Freedom to Publish Award, established in 2022 to highlight the growing threat to writers, publishers, and booksellers, honours an individual who has demonstrated “exceptional commitment to championing reading and free expression.” Previous winners have included Salman Rushdie, Boris Akunin, and HarperCollins publishing director, Arabella Pike. 

Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is about an evangelical dystopian United States where “unacceptable” but fertile women are robbed of their identities and treated as nothing more than walking wombs. In Canada, it is often part of our high school curriculum, but in the United States, it is frequently banned and criticized in schools. In order to protest these bans, Atwood released an “unburnable” edition in 2022, which was auctioned off, and the proceeds were donated to PEN America to support its work in favour of free expression. 

Atwood believes in free expression and that reading is a way to resist the suppression of ideas. While she does not refer to herself as an activist, she has worked towards this aim throughout her life. A few examples include the following. A public letter called “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate”, written in July 2020, to express the concern that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” included her signature. In 2024, Atwood attended at the Northern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium as part of the Edmonton Public Library’s Forward Thinking Speaker Series and spoke about freedom of expression. When asked what advice she had for librarians who work to promote access to information and intellectual freedom while under attack, Atwood referenced the Battle of Waterloo and suggested self-defence classes. Her work to support freedom of expression is not just confined to her recent years. She helped found the Canadian English-speaking chapter of PEN International, a group originally started to free politically imprisoned writers and held the position of PEN Canada’s president in the 1980s.

Margaret Atwood
at the Premiere Of Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Cinerama Dome, Hollywood, CA 04-25-17

Her commitment to freedom of expression is, I think, most prominent in her writing itself. The obvious example is The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are forbidden to read, and everyone is spied upon and encouraged to report on their neighbours for simply saying the wrong thing. Every one of the atrocities committed in the novel is based on fact and pulled from actual history. Her first novel, The Edible Woman, published in 1969, was a social satire of North American consumerism and is often cited by critics as an early example of the feminism often found in her works. 

Atwood was unable to attend the ceremony in London to accept her award in person, but she released a video acceptance speech advising authors to “be brave” because she cannot remember another time in her life “when words themselves have felt under such threat” and remarked that these times feel more like th 1930s and 40s than any of the 80 years since. Strong words considering her 60 years working in small press publishing, including time spent in the Soviet Union hand-producing and secretly circulating manuscripts. She cited a recent alarming increase in “political and religious polarisation” as a major cause for her concern. Atwood referenced censorship and book banning in the United States and elsewhere, as well as the “attempt to expel from universities anyone who disagrees with the dogmas of their would-be controllers.”

Atwood blamed extremism for this and specified that this is not confined to the “so call left or so called right”. Atwood said “All extremisms share the desire to erase their opponents, to stifle any creative expression that is not propaganda for themselves, and to shut down dialogue. They don’t want a dialogue, they want a monologue. They don’t want many voices, they want only one.” But she continued on to offer a message of empowerment: “I wish you strength and hope and the courage to withstand the mobs on one hand and the whims of vengeful potentates on the other.”

Other notable works that received awards during the British Book Awards include the late Alexi Navalny who won the overall book of the year award for his posthumous memoir, Patriot, which also won the nonfiction narrative book of the year award; Asako Yuzuki, who won the debut fiction award for Butter, as well as Percival Everett who won both author of the year and fiction book of the year.

 

Sources:

  1. Cooper-Fiske, Casey. “Margaret Atwood tells authors to be brave while ‘under threat’ after award win”. Independent. May 13, 2025. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/margaret-atwood-alexei-navalny-london-chris-hoy-boris-johnson-b2749788.html 
  2. “Margaret Atwood wins Freedom to Publish Award at 2025 British Book Awards”. CBC Books. May 13, 2025 https://www.cbc.ca/books/margaret-atwood-wins-freedom-to-publish-award-at-2025-british-book-awards-1.7532858
  3. “Margaret Atwood wins British Book Award for Freedom to Publish.” Quill & Quire. https://quillandquire.com/omni/margaret-atwood-wins-british-book-award-for-freedom-to-publish/ 
  4. “Atwood Responds to Book Bans with ‘Unburnable’ Edition of Handmaid’s Tale”. The Guardian. 2022. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/may/24/margaret-atwood-handmaids-tale-unburnable-edition 
  5. “Margaret Atwood says she cannot remember another time ‘when words themselves have felt under such threat’”. The Guardian. May 12, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/may/12/margaret-atwood-words-under-threat-freedom-to-publish-british-book-awards 
  6. Samek, Toni. “Consider this: Freedom of expression and Margaret Atwood”. The Quad, University of Alberta. November 28, 2024. https://www.ualberta.ca/en/the-quad/2024/11/consider-this-freedom-of-expression-and-margaret-atwood.html 

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