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In this wide-ranging and characteristically fearless exchange, Margaret Atwood sits down in Athens with poet and philosopher Haris Vlavianos to reflect on myth, politics, mortality, and the creative imagination. From Homer to The Handmaid’s Tale, from Tiresias to Trump, their conversation traces the long arc between ancient story and present crisis — how power is told, retold, and resisted. With sardonic humour and precision, Atwood revisits her own work through the eyes of myth: Penelope and her maids, sirens and shapeshifters, prophets and tyrants. Each theme turns back to a single question: what stories survive, and what do we bring back from the descent?
As the dialogue unfolds, Atwood speaks with unusual intimacy about the practice of writing — its rituals and terrors, its moral weight, its comic absurdities. She describes the writer’s task as a perilous journey into darkness, a “negotiation with the dead,” from which one hopes to emerge carrying light. Vlavianos meets her as equal and foil: philosopher, poet, and guide through the classical imagination. The result is both public conversation and private meditation — a spirited encounter between two minds steeped in literature and alive to the political urgencies of our time.
At once erudite and mischievous, The Stories We Bring Back reveals Atwood at her most lucid and unguarded. Part mythological symposium, part masterclass, part political reckoning, it is a book about the endurance of art and the stubborn hope that every act of storytelling — even in an age of noise and tyranny — remains, as Atwood insists, “an act of optimism.”
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and essays—including The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, Oryx and Crake, and Burning Questions—she has received the Booker Prize, the PEN Pinter Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Her work has been translated into over forty languages and adapted across stage and screen. She lives in Toronto.
Haris Vlavianos is a Greek poet, translator, and scholar. Educated at the University of Bristol and at Oxford, he is Professor of History, Political Theory, and History of Ideas at the American College of Greece, and editor of the literary journal Poetics. He is the author of more than a dozen collections of poetry and essays, and has translated T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, and William Blake into Greek.