Several recent factors, including the global success of Singaporean novelists like Amanda Lee Koe, Balli Kaur Jaswal and Sharlene Teo, as well as my forthcoming climate-crisis novel, have me thinking again about how much we writers write as global versus national citizens.

In my native Canada, few writers seem as Canadian as Margaret Atwood, yet what aspects of The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to her novel The Handmaid's Tale, are Canadian? Around the world, when women dress up in the now iconic red-and-white handmaids' costumes outside of legislatures, they do so to protest about gender inequity, not to invoke maple syrup, hockey or official bilingualism.