Books

Margaret Atwood to receive Hay Festival Medal for 'lifetime of ingenious and visionary fiction'

The Canadian novelist and poet will accept the 2018 Hay Festival Medal for prose in Wales.
Margaret Atwood attends the 2017 Emmy Awards for the television adaptation of her novel The Handmaid's Tale. (Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Margaret Atwood has been awarded the 2018 Hay Festival Medal for prose for "a lifetime of ingenious and visionary fiction." She'll receive the medal when she attends the festival in Wales, U.K. in May, where she'll be participating in three on-stage discussions.

Atwood's celebrated fiction includes her 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid's Talethe 2000 Booker Prize winner Blind Assassin and 1996 Giller Prize winner Alias GraceShe has also published comics, children's books and poetry.

In addition to Atwood, the Hay Festival announced two other honorees: Austrian poet Evelyn Schlag will receive the Medal for Poetry for her work in the festival's anthology Armistice and British artist Jackie Morris will receive the Medal for Illustration for the book The Lost Words written by Robert MacFarlane.

Previous Hay Festival medal recipients include Karl Ove Knausgaard, John le Carré and Jeanette Winterson.