Handmaids

Margaret Atwood was “the only person who benefited from the election of Donald Trump”, her agent told her soon after the US presidential election in November 2016.The television drama version of The Handmaid’s Tale had begun filming in the run-up to Trump’s divisive win. “We woke up the morning after and there was Donald Trump, and we all said to ourselves, ‘we are now a different show’,” Atwood told an audience at the Hay literary festival.“Nothing about it had changed but the frame around it had changed. It was going…

Amid political firestorms over books deemed by rightwingers to be unsuitable for school libraries, the author Margaret Atwood has announced an “unburnable” edition of her most famous novel, The Handmaid’s Tale.The Canadian author, 82, appeared in a short YouTube video to announce the project, attempting to flambé the one-off tome with a flame-thrower.Announcing the book, Penguin Random House said: “Across the United States and around the world, books are being challenged, banned and even burned. So we created a special…

My earliest reading memoryThe first coherent sentence I read was a newspaper headline: “Manchester closes down.” I learned to read aged three, by eavesdropping on my mother going over my older brother’s primary-school lessons, and I practised off the back of my father’s paper at the breakfast table (the Manchester Guardian, as it happened). I knew about shops and factories closing down, but I couldn’t understand a whole city suffering that fate. It turned out to mean that share prices on the Manchester stock exchange had…

Students of English literature would relate to the struggles faced by many while studying the subject. Therefore, it was no surprise when a student took to social media to seek guidance for an essay she was supposed to write for class on Margaret Atwood's book 'The Handmaid's Tale'. What was surprising, however, was the fact that the Man Booker Prize-winning author and poet responded to the tweet and actually answered the student's question! The student, who goes by the Twitter handle Momchill Gavrilov, posted…

“Nothing changes instantaneously: in a gradually heating bathtub you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.” This sagely observation that Margaret Atwood made in her 1985 book, The Handmaid's Tale, was all too true after the 2016 US election when women took to the streets (in 2017) to protest against President Donald Trump's governance, which made many feel like they were living in Atwood's dystopian world, Gilead. Handmade signs that said, "Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again" surfaced overnight, and The…