The Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood would like to see an opera created from her 2003 novel, Oryx and Crake.

Atwood — whose earlier work The Handmaid’s Tale was transformed into an opera in 2000 — told an audience at The Times Edinburgh International Book Festival that she had been a reluctant convert to operatic treatments of her work, but was now embracing them with enthusiasm.

“ Oryx and Crake will made a better opera than it would make a film,” Atwood said. “It is super-real, not like daily life, and that suits opera very well. Opera is symbolic, film is literal. In opera you can have people singing out their inner thoughts, which is much harder to do on film.”

Like The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake is a dystopian tale that tells the story of Snowman, who wears only a bed sheet and baseball hat and appears to be the last human on Earth.

His companions are strange hybrid creatures, such as pigeons and rakunks, and human-like beings that Snowman calls Crakers. As the plot develops, these lifeforms are revealed to be the products of genetic engineering. Oryx and Crake was short listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003.

Both novels represent what the Canadian novelist calls “speculative fiction”. The Handmaid’s Tale was transformed into an opera by the Danish composer Poul Ruders and represented the first commissioned work by the Danish Royal Opera for 34 years.

Atwood said that she had been surprised by both the notion of her first opera and its subsequent reception. “I felt Paul was crazy, but he had to have his way. It was a remarkable success.”

Since its world premiere, The Handmaid’s Tale has enjoyed popular runs in London and Copenhagen, where houses consistently sold out, and further success in the US and Canada. In Atwood’s home city of Toronto it has broken through to a younger audience, “people with nose jewellery and green hair”, she said.

Yesterday also marked the publication of The Door, Atwood’s first poetry collection for 12 years, and she performed her first public readings of the work to her Edinburgh audience. The poems cover themes including ageing, death, war and the art of the poet herself. Some address the life and death of Atwood’s mother, who died last December aged 97, and one, entitled The Year of the Hen, with the process of searching through the piles of keepsakes that people collect through their lives.

Among her mother’s possessions, Atwood said, she had found the only copy of her own first novel, written when she was 7 and telling the life story of an ant. She also found collected press cuttings and reviews of her own work and examples of her mother’s poems, pasted into scrapbooks dating from the 1920s.

Atwood’s presence in Edinburgh has been accentuated by her invention — the Longpen; a broadband device that enables authors to attend signings even though they are many miles away from a festival venue. On Sunday Norman Mailer, speaking via a video link from Massachusetts, used the technology.

Atwood, who has long been fascinated by technology, said that she had adapted techniques from long-distance surgery to create the Longpen: “I invented it so people could be in several places at one time, and not crawling around the room at 4am with a plane to catch.”