
Margaret Atwood wins Freedom to Publish Award at 2025 British Book Awards
The Freedom to Publish Award, given in partnership with the organization Index on Censorship, honours an individual who champions freedom of expression.
Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale and two-time Booker Prize winner, is an advocate for reading as a way to resist suppression of ideas. In her video acceptance speech, she recognized the importance of conversations and open communication in this particular historical moment.
"I cannot remember a time during my own life, when words themselves felt under such threat," Atwood said. "Political and religious polarization, which appeared to be on the wane for parts of the 20th century, has increased alarmingly in the past decade. The world feels to me more like the 1930s and 40s at present than it has in the intervening 80 years."
She also commended the work of publishers and booksellers as people who spread knowledge, fight polarization and foster dialogue.
"In a free world publishers and booksellers stand for the many," she said. "If free governments and the free human intelligence are to survive, the guardians and transmitters of words in all their multiplicity must be brave. I wish you strength and hope and the courage to withstand the mobs on one hand and the whims of vengeful potentates on the other."
Atwood has written fiction, nonfiction, poetry and comics. She began her writing career with poetry, publishing The Circle Game and winning the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry in the late 1960s.
Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Writer in the World Prize.
Her other notable books include the novels The Edible Woman, Oryx and Crake and Cat's Eye, the essay collection Burning Questions and the nonfiction work Survival.
Her memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, will be published in November 2025.
The 2025 British Book Awards also presented major honours to American writer Percival Everett, who won Author of the Year and Fiction Book of the Year for his novel James, and Alexei Navalny whose posthumous memoir Patriot was awarded Overall Book of the Year and Nonfiction Narrative Book of the Year.
The annual awards uplift the book industry, from the authors and illustrators to the booksellers. The complete list of Book of the Year winners is below. The book trade award winners can be found on the British Book Awards website.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


CBC
2 hours ago
- CBC
Ozzy Osbourne dead at 76
Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne, known as the godfather of heavy metal, has died at 76. Outside his decades-long music career, he gained new notoriety in the early 2000s on The Osbornes — a reality TV show about his family.

Globe and Mail
4 hours ago
- Globe and Mail
With Ozzy Osbourne's death, heavy metal loses its iron man
Rust never sleeps, and some iron does not rust. With 5.8 million or so other viewers, I watched the final Black Sabbath concert on July 5, streamed from the band's hometown Villa Park stadium in Birmingham, England. The penultimate song by the heavy metal pioneers was Iron Man, sung by Ozzy Osbourne. He was as inimitable as possible under the circumstances. The overlord sat on a throne, affected by Parkinson's disease. Improbably, at age 76, he looked fantastic: the long hair, the black eyeliner, the leather pants, the diabolic, bats-beware gaze. As Tony Iommi's iconic guitar riff lumbered forward like a zombie, Osbourne sang the first verse, almost drowned out by the vocals of the sold-out crowd of 45,000. Has he lost his mind? Can he see or is he blind? Can he walk at all? Or if he moves, will he fall? These were legitimate questions. Osbourne died on Tuesday, 17 days after the concert. I was introduced as a child to Iron Man from a jukebox at the YMCA in my hometown of Clifton Springs, N.Y. When I say introduced, I mean terrified. I suppose the metal-music malevolence registered as goofy to the rock critics of the early 1970s, but it cast quite a spell on this little boy. Hearing Iron Man (and Bloodrock's D.O.A.) frightened me stiff. And by frightened, I mean fascinated − in particular by Osbourne's eerie voice. Though he was neither the best metal singer nor the worst, his throat was unique. The sound was coppery, with a fresh hell's reverb. He came to be known as the Prince of Darkness. His dark-side legend increased when he bit the head off a bat on stage in 1982. There was a rabies concern, but a hospital test determined that other bats would be fine − Osbourne was not a carrier. While Osbourne was macabre, he was as avuncular as he was demonic. So what if he laughed maniacally at the beginning of his debut solo single in 1980? We all bought a ticket on the Crazy Train anyway. When he reinvented himself in 2002 as a doddering reality television star on The Osbournes − something of an actual Addams Family − the world found out it was his wife, Sharon Osbourne, who was to be feared. Ozzy, it turns out, was harmless. Mary J. Blige, Cher, Ozzy Osbourne and A Tribe Called Quest among inductees into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame I spoke to him upon the release of his 2010 autobiography, I Am Ozzy. Naturally I asked what the hellraiser's gravestone would say when he died. 'I don't have a choice,' he said. 'It's whatever they want to put. I'm not so bigheaded enough to say, 'Ozzy Osbourne was a great human being.'' Black Sabbath's 10-hour farewell concert – dubbed Back to the Beginning – featured a slew of all-star guests such as Metallica and Slayer and included a solo set by Osbourne. It raised millions of pounds for the Acorns Children's Hospice, Birmingham Children's Hospital and Cure Parkinson's. The show's finale was Sabbath's classic Paranoid. The lyrics were penned by bassist Geezer Butler, but if we're looking for epitaphs: And so, as you hear these words Telling you now of my state I tell you to enjoy life I wish I could but it's too late


CTV News
5 hours ago
- CTV News
‘It has become a big problem': Artists frustrated with increase in AI ‘art'
Local artists are upset that some are using AI to create art and selling it. With more, here's CTV London's Lauren Stallone. Emily Marie, a local artist and owner of 'Unstitched', spends hours making homemade crafts. Marie sells her creations at local craft shows, but lately she has been faced with an unusual challenge. 'It has become a big problem in a lot of markets,' said Marie. 'There are people coming in and passing off that they are making these crafts, not telling people they are AI.' Marie said vendors using AI should be honest and not claim their products as homemade. 'They're not considering the time, the energy, the thought that went into something like this,' said Maire. 'For people to just be plugging a prompt into AI and just basically discrediting our hard work it feels almost insulting.' Experts describe this as 'a big issue,' not only for visual art but also music, sounds, and text. Emily Marie Emily Marie, a local artist and owner of 'Unstitched,' as seen on July 22, 2025. (Lauren Stallone/CTV News London) 'How these systems work is that they are trained on a huge amount of data that's usually scraped from the internet–from artists who are out there, who are alive and trying to make money,' said Luke Stark, an assistant professor in the faculty of information and media studies at Western University. Stark argued these tools can be 'extremely disruptive' and it is important for consumers to understand who is behind them. 'You might feel like you get a little bit of benefit from using systems like Chatgpt to do x, y, and z at work, but then does that mean your job is at risk of being automated?' said Stark. 'With these tools, don't think about them as science fiction, think of them as automation tools benefiting someone in society and ask who that is.' While the future of AI may be unclear, Marie said her passion for sharing art with the community isn't going anywhere. 'I cannot tell you how amazing it feels to see somebody who looks and says, 'Oh my gosh that's so cute,'' said Marie. 'I thought that was cute and I love that other people think it's cute too.'