Margaret Atwood has presence.

Speaking slowly in a low voice, she read from her short story Stone Mattress, glancing up at the packed audience as she skewered the pretensions of cruise ship travellers from the point of view of a much-married adventuress. Ripples of laughter ran through the women listening.

Atwood turned many questions back to her interviewer and former mentee Naomi Alderman, listening carefully to her thoughts on a wilderness journey they’d taken together.

When challenged about using her serious writing talents on speculative and dystopian genre fiction Atwood eloquently explained: “Nothing about the material itself is inherently high or low,” drawing parallels between the gods of Olympus visiting humans in ancient mythology, and contemporary accounts of alien visitations.

She mentioned male writers such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson who were not challenged when they wrote ghost stories and psychological horror respectively, and drily cited tropes from cultural history: “In the 1950s, detached ambulatory body parts were very popular.”

After a witty and wide-ranging discussion about the environment, the generation gap, and the century-long project Future Library, one audience member whispered appreciatively to her companion: “That Margaret Atwood – she’d be great fun down the pub!”