A book which preserves in print the almost lost oral literature of the Native American Haida people has been published in the UK for the first time, thanks to its championing by the Canadian Booker prize winner Margaret Atwood, who calls A Story as Sharp as a Knife is a “book of wonders”.

In 1901, the linguist and ethnographer John Swanton travelled to an archipelago off the coast of British Columbia and Alaska, known as Haida Gwaii. He listened to the last two great Haida poets, Ghandl and Skaay, at a time when their people had almost died out, and an interpreter helped him write down phonic transcriptions and a rough translation of what he believed were folk tales.

Almost 100 years later, the Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst came across Swanton’s work in a library, taught himself Haida, and set about a new translation, hoping to bring the work to a wider audience. Bringhurst believes that the Haida oral literature was poetry, although a poetry which used neither rhyme nor metre. He published A Story as Sharp as a Knife, the first part of his trilogy Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers, in the US and Canada in 1999. But the award-winning work had never made it to the UK – until Atwood convinced boutique publisher the Folio Society to take a look.

A Story as Sharp as a Knife – translations of the oral literature of the Haida by the poet Robert Bringhurst – is published by the Folio Society with illustrations by the Haida artist Don Yeomans and an introduction by Margaret Atwood. Photograph: Folio Society

“Margaret Atwood directed us to it,” says Johanna Geary, managing editor at the Folio Society, which has just released the first UK edition of the book, with illustrations by Haida artist Don Yeomans, for £80. “We’d published an edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, and she’d mentioned it to us as something we should look at publishing. She is such a champion of this book, and Bringhurst.”

“It’s one of those books which not many people know about, but those who do, want to tell everyone about it,” said Geary. “On the face of it, it does seem like a very local story, about Haida-speaking storytellers in a small part of Canada; their way of life and culture. It does seem very specific. But it’s a way to look at how this mythology fits into a wider world of literature, and it’s incredible.”

Atwood has written an introduction for the new edition in which she describes Bringhurst as: “A kind of genius … the perfect Prince Charming to come across John Swanton’s neglected Haida oral poetry transcriptions, and to hack his way – with help – through the thicket of brambles surrounding them.”

“He needed to teach himself Haida, a language which he still claims not to speak (though he could fool just about everyone on that score, since there are only a handful of truly fluent speakers alive). He then needed to discover the structural principles of the epics he was translating: not easy, since Haida (like Japanese) does not use rhyme as a structuring principle, nor does it use metrical feet in the way that English and French do,” writes Atwood.

Bringhurst also learned the iconography of the Haida. Others, says Atwood: “would have been daunted by the challenge, [but] into the dark forest he plunged; and then, after battles we can only begin to imagine, out of the forest he came, carrying this book of wonders.” It is a work, Atwood writes, that “opens locked doors ... reveals vistas ... illuminates”. It shows that oral poems are not “the product of some anonymous ‘mass’ [but the] creations of individuals working within their cultures”.

Atwood quotes Bringhurst, who writes of one of Ghandl’s performances: “It is a work of music built from silent images, sounding down the years. It is a vision painted indelibly in the air with words that disappear the moment they are spoken.”

Ghandl’s spoken poetry, Bringhurst adds, “is both familiar and one of a kind. It is something new and locally flavoured, fulfilling age-old, independently recurrent and widely travelled themes. And it is part of a whole forest of themes and variations, echoes and allusions, spreading out through space and time. It is one piece of work; it is also part of a fabric that is torn and patched, woven and unwoven day after day, night after night, and sentence after sentence, like the cloth on Penelope’s loom.”