"Margaret Atwood on Monday accepted the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University in Israel, telling an interviewer before the ceremony that to snub the honor would be tantamount to “throwing overboard the thousands of writers around the world who are in prison, censored, exiled and murdered for what they have published.”Ms. Atwood, the Canadian author of “The Year of the Flood” and a vice president of International PEN, the literary human rights group, shared the $1 million prize with the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh (“Sea of Poppies”). Prior to the awards ceremony, Ms. Atwood had been urged by Palestinian groups and writers from other countries not to accept the prize as a protest of Israel’s policies toward the Gaza Strip and its artists. But Ms. Atwood was not persuaded, telling Bloomberg News, “We don’t do cultural boycotts."
God bless Margaret Atwood. I like her fiction and I like her poetry but now I also like her. Let's hear it for a little moral seriousness.
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