The following are Margaret Atwood’s on-tour answers to ten of the questions submitted by the Bloomsbury Reading Club.

Your novels range across a number of genres including gothic romance, domestic comedy, science fiction fantasy, the dystopian and the historical novel. Which comes first, the idea or the genre?

Neither comes first — what comes is usually a scene, a character, an object, and sometimes a view of the novel as seen from the distance — like an Italian town on a hill. These things acts as clues, and attract more and more — people, items, scenes, events — since once you’ve started, there’s a need to go on, shaping all the while. The novel is a path, for the writer as well as for the reader. Not for nothing did Dante begin in a dark forest.

Do you still write poetry regularly?

I’ve never written poetry regularly. I seem to write it in bursts. I have a number of uncollected poems, but the future is not predicatable so I don’t know what will happen.

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