Margaret Atwood wins the Raymond Chandler Award

The Noir Literature International Award 2017

The Canadian writer Margaret Atwood is this year's winner of the Raymond Chandler Award, the literary award annually bestowed on noir fiction by a master of this genre. The Canadian writer will be handed the award on Thursday, December 7th at 9 p.m. at the Teatro Sociale in Como.

Noir in Festival, Italy’s most important showcase devoted to the noir genre in film and literature, is now in its 27th Edition and will be held in Milan and Como from December 4th-10th, 2017. This year it assigns its most-coveted literary prize, the Raymond Chandler Award for Lifetime Achievement, to a novelist who embodies the finest features of so-called genre fiction, be it noir or science fiction, fantasy or a revisiting of the "darkest" of fairy tales, transcending them all to create an all-embracing, noble conception of literature.

Committed on several fronts, from conservation to feminism, Margaret Atwood’s civic engagement feeds into an equally impassioned commitment to her writing, a medium which is transformed by this ‘otherness’ along with its style, allusive as a metaphor yet concrete, as in every story worthy of the name. Atwood’s stories and metaphors have touched readers around the world and are reaching more daily, thanks in no small part to their latest adaptations for the small screen: the TV series The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace.

The Raymond Chandler Award, established by film critic Irene Bignardi in 1996, thanks to a collaboration with the Raymond Chandler Estate, has been bestowed on a host of leading literary figures writing noir fiction in past years, including P.D. James, John le Carré, John Grisham, Elmore Leonard, Scott Turow, Michael Connelly, Andrea Camilleri, Don Winslow, Henning Mankell, Joe Lansdale and many others, all the way up to the 2016 winner, Roberto Saviano.