Margaret Atwood’s short prose piece, “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon,” poses a conundrum for anyone seeking to place it within a genre. With features of science fiction, speculative fiction and a postmodern prose poem, the text addresses the topic of climate change and its concomitant fiction without offering closure. After examining and attempting to resolve the issue of genre, the paper aligns Atwood’s discourse of indeterminacy with the parallel discourse of climate change as expressed in science writing, in order to account for this text’s unusual structural and stylistic features.

The article presents the results of a culture quiz that was administered among undergraduate students of English and Translation at the University of Maribor in 2019. Comprising twenty items from five domains of culture that the respondents had to identify, the results of the quiz showed that that the students were most familiar with items from the domains of technology and its closely related vocabulary, followed by sports, politics and high culture (drama, literature, ballet). The study also suggested some differences based on respondents’ gender and their high school grade performance in English. The results partly overlap with the results of a similar study from 2007, corroborating that popular culture remains the most recognizable cultural domain among the surveyed students.

The article briefly explores the rationale for requiring certain types of activities from novice translation students. Three groups of such activities are presented: imitation, analysis and application, each followed by a brief discussion of its effectiveness when used with first-year students in the Translation Programme at the Pedagogical Faculty, University of Maribor.

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When Margaret Atwood celebrated her 80th birthday in November 2019, there was a feeling that the occasion called for a burst of applause – figuratively speaking. Around Europe, many Canadian scholars and Canadian Studies Associations responded with a range of activities. Slovenia contributed handsomely: first, with an event at the Univerzitetna knjižnica Maribor – Fourscore and More: Margaret Atwood at Eighty – and second, with this special issue dedicated to Atwood’s recent work.