The Stories We Bring Back: Margaret Atwood on Myth, Mortality, and the Art of Writing (ERIS Dialogues)

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.”