This online-only event was live at 6:00 p.m. (PDT) on Wednesday, September 9. Novelist, memoirist, and podcast host Cheryl Strayed moderated the evening’s conversation.

All tickets (except Student/25&U and complimentary tickets) come with a paperback edition of The Testaments. Books will be mailed to ticket holders from Elliott Bay Book Company, our bookstore partner, a week after the event.

In addition to the dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale, now a successful MGM-Hulu television series currently preparing its fourth season, Margaret Atwood’s novels include Cat’s Eye, shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, shortlisted for the 2003 Booker Prize; The Penelopiad; The Heart Goes Last; Hag-seed; and The Testaments, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, published in September 2019.

The Testaments—her latest—is a modern masterpiece, and a powerful novel that can be read on its own or as a companion to The Handmaid’s Tale. With The Testaments, Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

Atwood is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature.

Cheryl Strayed, our moderator for the evening, is the author of the best-selling memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, the essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, and the novel Torch. Strayed is the host of the New York Times hit podcast, Sugar Calling and also Dear Sugars, which she co-hosted with Steve Almond. She lives in Portland, Oregon.