Who Wrote The Handmaid's Tale? Margaret Atwood (1985)

Q: Who wrote The Handmaid's Tale?

The Handmaid’s Tale was written by Canadian author Margaret Atwood and published in 1985. It’s a dystopian novel set in Gilead, a totalitarian state that has replaced the United States, where women have lost their rights. The narrator, Offred, is a “Handmaid” forced to bear children for powerful men.

Life in Gilead

Group	Role
Commanders	Ruling men
Wives	Commanders’ wives, wearing blue
Handmaids	Women forced to bear children, wearing red cloaks and white bonnets
Aunts	Women who train and control Handmaids
Marthas	Household servants, wearing green

Handmaids’ names show who they belong to: Offred means “of Fred,” her Commander.

“Nothing that hasn’t happened”

Atwood said she included nothing in the book that humans had not already done somewhere in history, from book bans to forced childbearing and secret police. She wrote much of it in West Berlin in 1984, while the city was still divided.

The TV series

The Hulu series (2017–2025), starring Elisabeth Moss as June (Offred), won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 2017, the first for a streaming service. The red Handmaid costume became a symbol at protests about women’s rights around the world.

The Testaments

Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments (2019), is set 15 years later and told by three women. It shared the Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. Atwood had also won the Booker in 2000 for The Blind Assassin.

Margaret Atwood

Born in Ottawa in 1939, Atwood has written more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and essays, including Oryx and Crake and Alias Grace. She also co-invented the LongPen, a device for signing books remotely.

Dystopian classics

Book	Author	Year
Brave New World	Aldous Huxley	1932; see who wrote Brave New World
Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	1949
Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	1953
The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	1985