Margaret Atwood seems embarrassed by the sheer volume of her output

Margaret Atwood is among the major writers of English fiction of our time. This is a very boring way to start a review, but it is true. Atwood, now 82, is prize-winning, popular and prolific. She’s won two Bookers. Several of her books have attained totemic status with readers, most obviously the reproductive dystopia of The Handmaid’s Tale, but also Cat’s Eye, for its steely portrayal of girlhood cruelty, and The Blind Assassin, which combines feminist grit with genre-straddling swagger.

And there are so many books. Seventeen novels, more than a dozen collections of poetry, sundry shorter fictions and children’s stories, and multiple works of non-fiction, of which Burning Questions is the 11th overall and the third compilation of Atwood’s journalism, essays and speeches. It’s an embarrassment of content, and Atwood does sound almost embarrassed about it. In the introduction to Burning Questions she comes close to issuing an apology for the sheer volume of her output:

If you’re asked to write ten occasional essays a year and say no to 90 per cent of them, that comes to one essay a year. But if you’re asked to write 400 pieces and you still say no to 90 per cent of them — how firm and virtuous you are! — that’s still 40 pieces a year. I’ve been averaging 40 a year for the last couple of decades. There’s a limit. This has to stop.

There’s an important lesson for writers here: just because someone asks you to do something, you don’t have to say yes. Selectivity is important. Similarly, just because you’ve written something, you don’t have to put it in your collected works. This is something Atwood could do with working on; Burning Questions is unrelentingly completist. Here you’ll find book reviews, op-ed pieces, introductions to other books and the texts of speeches to audiences including the Canadian Department of Forestry and PEN International, the free speech group.