Margaret Atwood is collecting essays she has written over the past 17 years and compiling them in a new book.

Burning Questions: Essays 2004‒2021 will be published on March 1, 2022.

The collection will be published by McClelland & Stewart. According to the press release, the 50 pieces will answer questions such as "Why do people everywhere, in all cultures, tell stories?," "How can we live on our planet?" and "What do zombies have to do with authoritarianism?" and will cover topics such as debt, climate change and the pandemic.

"It's been a wild ride so far, the 21st century. Many of the questions that have been smouldering for decades have now burst into flames. Unless we can answer them, quickly and effectively, so will we," Atwood said in a press statement.

Burning Questions is not Atwood's only book coming out in 2022. She also edited and contributed to a pandemic novel titled Fourteen Days, which is scheduled for the spring.

Atwood is one of Canada's most celebrated writers. She has been publishing poetry, fiction and nonfiction since the 1960s. Her acclaimed books include The Handmaid's Tale, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake and The Edible Woman. Her early poetry collection The Circle Game won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry.

She also won the Booker Prize twice, in 2000 for The Blind Assassin and in 2019 for The Testaments. She shared the 2019 prize with British writer Bernardine Evaristo. She also won the Giller Prize in 1996 for Alias Grace.

Earlier this year, the Writers' Trust of Canada announced their fiction prize would be renamed after Atwood and her long-time partner Graeme Gibson. Atwood and Gibson were among the co-founders of the Writers' Trust.

Atwood was named a companion to the Order of Canada in 1981. She also co-founded the Griffin Poetry Prize.