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 [working on] 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 to be viewed differently than if Hillary Clinton had won.”
The TV adaptation of Atwood’s dystopian novel about a totalitarian and religiously fundamentalist regime in which enslaved women are forced to bear children was hugely successful when it began airing in April 2017, three months after Trump took office. The sixth and final season is expected to be in production this year.
It propelled Atwood, already an acclaimed author, to new fame, and her novel, first published in 1985, topped the bestseller lists in the following months. She told the Hay audience she had begun writing the story after Ronald Reagan became US president in 1980, which brought about “the activation of the religious right as a political force”.
She published a sequel to the Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, in 2019, which centres on the character of Aunt Lydia, who turns against the Gilead regime. The novel was joint winner of the 2019 Booker prize.
“As a longtime student of totalitarianism and how [such regimes] fall apart, there are always subversives from the inside, often quite highly placed ones, who have fallen out of love with the prevailing ideology, because they have seen the results of it. [Aunt Lydia] becomes one of those people,” Atwood said.
The author, 83, has recently published a volume of autobiographical short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, to add to her tally of 17 novels and 18 volumes of poetry.
As a writer, “you have an accumulation that can either go in a drawer or into the wastebasket or into a book. The ones you put in a drawer are ones that you think you might be able to use later on.”
She started writing for magazines aged 20 under initials “because I didn’t want anyone to know I was a girl. It was 1960, everything was very male throughout the 50s and 60s.
“Everybody called me Peggy. For a while I published as a student under ‘Peggy’.” But she was told: “If you call yourself Peggy, nobody will take you seriously.”
Atwood said she fitted writing in with “whatever else I’m doing”, and was used to writing on planes and in hotel rooms. On one flight, she was working on The Testaments at a time when someone was trying to steal the manuscript by pretending to be an agent.
She became absorbed in watching the children’s movie Captain Underpants, and disembarked the plane leaving her open laptop on board. It was recovered with the help of “heroes” from the airline, she said.
