Ben East sits down with the Canadian author Margaret Atwood before she visits Dubai for the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature
Margaret Atwood celebrated her 71st birthday at the end of last year, which coincided with the 25th anniversary of the book that is widely regarded as her masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale. That novel's brilliance lay in its vision of an extremist future, and to this day Atwood looks forward rather than back. She's one of the most followed authors on Twitter and, before we've even completed initial formalities, she directs me towards the latest posts on her blog. I'm not surprised to find they discuss how technology will impact on book publishing.
Far from settling into benign retirement, then, Atwood appears to be more relevant than ever. A recent editorial in The Observer in the UK suggested that delegates at the climate summit in Cancun should have had Atwood as required reading, thanks to her perceptive writing on the environment, and her status as an acclaimed poet, essayist, critic, thinker and activist means there's little time for rose-tinted views of the past. But she does permit herself one furtive glance.
"When I first started, I put my books in a cardboard box, got on to a Greyhound bus and went to towns where there were no book stores," she says from her home in Canada. "I did my event in a high-school gymnasium, sold the books afterwards and put the money into an envelope before mailing it back to the publisher. This was in the early 1970s. It was my generation that invented the book tour, the festival, the reading."
So the world of e-books and digital reading must thrill her.
"Well, yes, we're in the middle of a sea-change in transmission tools for literature right now, in a way that hasn't been experienced since Gutenberg. But in some ways the problem for authors is exactly the same: how do I get my book into the hands of the reader? Because, make no mistake, you write to be read. Even if it's a diary, you're writing for the future you. Or, so you can remember what you did, which I have to say is increasingly my position!"
Atwood laughs - and it strikes me immediately that it would probably be great fun to listen to her read her books: many have been described as dark dystopias, and yet they're shot through with sardonic humour. There's a noticeable mischief in her dry drawl, and she loves wrestling with knotty ideas. So the subject of her first event at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature - what the digital revolution might mean for fiction in the future - should be an intriguing starting point because it's her fascination with what might come next for our planet that characterises her best novels. Like The Handmaid's Tale, her 11th novel Oryx and Crake was set on a future Earth, this time devastated by a virus - she's referred to it, tongue-in-cheek, as "a fun-packed, joke-filled, rollicking adventure tale about the end of the human race." That was followed by its loose sequel in 2009, The Year of the Flood. What is it that continues to intrigue her about the fate of the planet?
"I think everybody alive is interested in the future," she says, before adroitly turning the question back to me. "Tell me," she asks. "How old are you?"
When I reply that I'm approximately half her age, she laughs again.
"So a lot of the things in my books are going to be your problems. They're not my problems because I will be dead. So maybe I'm writing my books for you. That's a scary thought, isn't it?"
So if Oryx and Crake is anything to go by, I have a future beset by freak weather, strange genetically modified animals and, eventually, the collapse of civilisation. Great.
"People ask if they're cautionary tales," Atwood surmises. "And, yes, they are. Any dystopia is a cautionary tale. But I don't relish the fact that they've become truer as I've got older. You don't write books like these if you actually want them to become true.
"I mean, I'm not worried about the world not existing. We're unlikely to kill all life on Earth by blowing up the entire planet. But are we going to do away with ourselves? That's much more possible."
It's this kind of realism - she's not so much "save the planet" as "save humanity" - which sets Atwood apart from pure science fiction writers. Atwood calls her work "speculative fiction", where the setting is always an Earth we could recognise. She has no real interest in writing about "things with tentacles that talk", although that didn't prevent her from winning the first Arthur C Clarke award for science fiction writing in 1987. And such distinctions fascinate her: Atwood's next book is called In Other Worlds: Science Fiction and the Human Imagination. It collates three of her recent lectures on her relationship with the form.
"Little did you know I have a deep background in science fiction - it was my Harvard thesis in the 1960s," she says. "There's the line of literature that descends from HG Wells's War of the Worlds, which is stuff that couldn't happen. Personally, I'm more interested in George Orwell's 1984, because it really could happen. And it has. But in the end, what matters isn't genre. It's whether it's a good book. I don't read according to genre; I read according to whether the story ropes me in."
Science - or speculative - fiction is hardly Atwood's only forte as a writer. Atwood will also appear at a gala evening during the festival with four other international poets, and poetry (her first published work was a 1961 poetry collection) continues to exert a strange pull on her.
"You can't sit down on a Monday and think 'I'm going to write a poem.' It just doesn't happen that way," she says when I ask her if the writing process - in whatever shape it takes - is about finding the form to fit the feeling. "But you can sit down on a Monday and say 'today I'm going to get through five pages of this book if it kills me'. You can't will yourself to write poetry. There's an unbidden element to it which you cannot control. It's an individual experience - and very difficult to describe, actually."
And then she tries.
"Think of it in terms of wavelengths," she begins. "Very short wavelengths in which the tops of the waves are close together and the energy is very condensed. And then think of long wavelengths where the tops are further apart. That pattern takes up a lot more space. So the first pattern is the lyric poem. The second pattern is the novel. In terms of immediate gratification, for me, it's poetry. In terms of long projects that involve you day and night for months and years, it's the novel. Which is more pleasurable depends on how you define pleasure - it's like asking whether you prefer sprints or marathons."
It's interesting that Atwood should resort to science to explain her relationship with poetry. She grew up with scientists (her brother is a neurophysiologist) and says she understands how they think. "Scientists are as creative as artists because it's the lateral thinking, the obsession with problems, which provoke ideas," she says.
Such scholarly asides litter our conversation - Atwood is formidable but always engaging. All of which should make for lively - if tangential - debate at the festival. Still, at least she's actually here this time. Famously, in 2009, she pulled out after a controversy surrounding the content of a book by Geraldine Bedell.
"I should have known better," she groans now. "I read something in a respectable newspaper that said she had been banned and took it as true. So I leapt into my superhero costume a bit too soon and said I wouldn't come.
"And then, after about a week of investigation, I found out that she hadn't been banned at all, just not invited. That's quite different. Banned to me is piles of books burning in squares, someone trying to kill you. It's exclusion. But not being invited happens to me all the time! Anyway, when I finally found this out, it was too late to come, so I went to a Toronto office building in the middle of the night and did a video discussion about freedom of speech."
This time, happily, she'll be here in person. "Yes, and it'll be very interesting. What a great time to be going with all the tumult in the Middle East. I'll hear a lot of stuff."
And, for once, not exclusively via Twitter.
Gala Evening 2, March 9, Theatre, Dubai Cultural and Scientific Association
Digital Revolution 1, March 11, Al Ras 2, InterContinental Hotel
Brief scoreline:
Manchester United 2
Rashford 28', Martial 72'
Watford 1
Doucoure 90'
COMPANY%20PROFILE
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Key changes
Commission caps
For life insurance products with a savings component, Peter Hodgins of Clyde & Co said different caps apply to the saving and protection elements:
• For the saving component, a cap of 4.5 per cent of the annualised premium per year (which may not exceed 90 per cent of the annualised premium over the policy term).
• On the protection component, there is a cap of 10 per cent of the annualised premium per year (which may not exceed 160 per cent of the annualised premium over the policy term).
• Indemnity commission, the amount of commission that can be advanced to a product salesperson, can be 50 per cent of the annualised premium for the first year or 50 per cent of the total commissions on the policy calculated.
• The remaining commission after deduction of the indemnity commission is paid equally over the premium payment term.
• For pure protection products, which only offer a life insurance component, the maximum commission will be 10 per cent of the annualised premium multiplied by the length of the policy in years.
Disclosure
Customers must now be provided with a full illustration of the product they are buying to ensure they understand the potential returns on savings products as well as the effects of any charges. There is also a “free-look” period of 30 days, where insurers must provide a full refund if the buyer wishes to cancel the policy.
“The illustration should provide for at least two scenarios to illustrate the performance of the product,” said Mr Hodgins. “All illustrations are required to be signed by the customer.”
Another illustration must outline surrender charges to ensure they understand the costs of exiting a fixed-term product early.
Illustrations must also be kept updatedand insurers must provide information on the top five investment funds available annually, including at least five years' performance data.
“This may be segregated based on the risk appetite of the customer (in which case, the top five funds for each segment must be provided),” said Mr Hodgins.
Product providers must also disclose the ratio of protection benefit to savings benefits. If a protection benefit ratio is less than 10 per cent "the product must carry a warning stating that it has limited or no protection benefit" Mr Hodgins added.
SPECS
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Vidaamuyarchi
Director: Magizh Thirumeni
Stars: Ajith Kumar, Arjun Sarja, Trisha Krishnan, Regina Cassandra
Rating: 4/5
How to help
Call the hotline on 0502955999 or send "thenational" to the following numbers:
2289 - Dh10
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Paatal Lok season two
Directors: Avinash Arun, Prosit Roy
Stars: Jaideep Ahlawat, Ishwak Singh, Lc Sekhose, Merenla Imsong
Rating: 4.5/5
JOKE'S%20ON%20YOU
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Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989
Director: Goran Hugo Olsson
Rating: 5/5
Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World by Michael Ignatieff
Harvard University Press
The%C2%A0specs%20
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Diriyah%20project%20at%20a%20glance
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The specs
Engine: Four electric motors, one at each wheel
Power: 579hp
Torque: 859Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh825,900
On sale: Now
The biog:
Languages: Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, basic Russian
Favourite food: Pizza
Best food on the road: rice
Favourite colour: silver
Favourite bike: Gold Wing, Honda
Favourite biking destination: Canada
The%20specs
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The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
How to help
Send “thenational” to the following numbers or call the hotline on: 0502955999
2289 – Dh10
2252 – Dh 50
6025 – Dh20
6027 – Dh 100
6026 – Dh 200
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
The specs
Engine: Dual 180kW and 300kW front and rear motors
Power: 480kW
Torque: 850Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic
Price: From Dh359,900 ($98,000)
On sale: Now
COMPANY%20PROFILE
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EName%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EShaffra%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EStarted%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E2023%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EBased%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EDIFC%20Innovation%20Hub%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ESector%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Emetaverse-as-a-Service%20(MaaS)%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestment%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Ecurrently%20closing%20%241.5%20million%20seed%20round%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestment%20stage%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Epre-seed%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EInvestors%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EFlat6Labs%20Abu%20Dhabi%20and%20different%20PCs%20and%20angel%20investors%20from%20Saudi%20Arabia%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ENumber%20of%20staff%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3Enine%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
The specs
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Transmission: ten-speed
Power: 420bhp
Torque: 624Nm
Price: Dh325,125
On sale: Now
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: HyperSpace
Started: 2020
Founders: Alexander Heller, Rama Allen and Desi Gonzalez
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: Entertainment
Number of staff: 210
Investment raised: $75 million from investors including Galaxy Interactive, Riyadh Season, Sega Ventures and Apis Venture Partners
VEZEETA PROFILE
Date started: 2012
Founder: Amir Barsoum
Based: Dubai, UAE
Sector: HealthTech / MedTech
Size: 300 employees
Funding: $22.6 million (as of September 2018)
Investors: Technology Development Fund, Silicon Badia, Beco Capital, Vostok New Ventures, Endeavour Catalyst, Crescent Enterprises’ CE-Ventures, Saudi Technology Ventures and IFC
Electric scooters: some rules to remember
- Riders must be 14-years-old or over
- Wear a protective helmet
- Park the electric scooter in designated parking lots (if any)
- Do not leave electric scooter in locations that obstruct traffic or pedestrians
- Solo riders only, no passengers allowed
- Do not drive outside designated lanes
Cryopreservation: A timeline
- Keyhole surgery under general anaesthetic
- Ovarian tissue surgically removed
- Tissue processed in a high-tech facility
- Tissue re-implanted at a time of the patient’s choosing
- Full hormone production regained within 4-6 months
RESULTS
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E6pm%3A%20Baniyas%20%E2%80%93%20Group%202%20(PA)%20Dh97%2C500%20(Dirt)%201%2C400m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20AF%20Alajaj%2C%20Tadhg%20O%E2%80%99Shea%20(jockey)%2C%20Ernst%20Oertel%20(trainer)%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E6.35pm%3A%20The%20Pointe%20%E2%80%93%20Maiden%20(TB)%20Dh82%2C500%20(D)%201%2C200m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Awasef%2C%20Pat%20Dobbs%2C%20Doug%20Watson%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E7.10pm%3A%20Palm%20West%20Beach%20%E2%80%93%20Maiden%20(TB)%20Dh82%2C500%20(D)%201%2C400m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Long%20Kiss%2C%20Jose%20da%20Silva%2C%20Antonio%20Cintra%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E7.45pm%3A%20The%20View%20at%20the%20Palm%20%E2%80%93%20Handicap%20(TB)%20Dh87%2C500%20(D)%201%2C200m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Ranaan%2C%20Tadhg%20O%E2%80%99Shea%2C%20Bhupat%20Seemar%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E8.20pm%3A%20Nakheel%20%E2%80%93%20Handicap%20(TB)%20Dh105%2C000%20(D)%201%2C400m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Raaeb%2C%20Antonio%20Fresu%2C%20Musabah%20Al%20Muhairi%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E8.55pm%3A%20The%20Club%20%E2%80%93%20Handicap%20(TB)%20Dh95%2C000%20(D)%201%2C900m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Qareeb%2C%20Sam%20Hitchcock%2C%20Doug%20Watson%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3E9.30pm%3A%20Palm%20Beach%20Towers%20%E2%80%93%20Handicap%20(TB)%20Dh87%2C500%20(D)%201%2C600m%3C%2Fstrong%3E%3Cbr%3EWinner%3A%20Falsehood%2C%20Adrie%20de%20Vries%2C%20Musabah%20Al%20Muhairi%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
German intelligence warnings
- 2002: "Hezbollah supporters feared becoming a target of security services because of the effects of [9/11] ... discussions on Hezbollah policy moved from mosques into smaller circles in private homes." Supporters in Germany: 800
- 2013: "Financial and logistical support from Germany for Hezbollah in Lebanon supports the armed struggle against Israel ... Hezbollah supporters in Germany hold back from actions that would gain publicity." Supporters in Germany: 950
- 2023: "It must be reckoned with that Hezbollah will continue to plan terrorist actions outside the Middle East against Israel or Israeli interests." Supporters in Germany: 1,250
Source: Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution
The specs
AT4 Ultimate, as tested
Engine: 6.2-litre V8
Power: 420hp
Torque: 623Nm
Transmission: 10-speed automatic
Price: From Dh330,800 (Elevation: Dh236,400; AT4: Dh286,800; Denali: Dh345,800)
On sale: Now