Margaret Atwood: A Word After a Word After a Word Is Power

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood has achieved international acclaim for her life's work. Her greatest success to date came in 1985 when she published "The Handsmaid's Tale" - a dystopic novel set in a ficticious totalitarian patriarchy name Gilead. In 2019, she followed it up with a sequel entitled "The Testaments," which also became a global bestseller. Born in 1939, Atwood came of age in a time when women were supposed to be mothers, housewives and - at best - teachers. She outgrew the boundaries set for women at the time, but feminist experiences continue to inform her work to this day. Atwood wrote her most successful novel to date, "The Handsmaid's Tale" while she was living in West Berlin in the early 1980s. At the time, the city was nicknamed "Island in the Red Sea" because it was surrounded by an insurmountable concrete wall beyond which lay communist East Germany. The totalitarian East German regime inspired Atwood to imagine what a North American totalitarian regime might look like. The tale has, however, not entirely sprung from the mind of its writer: According to Atwood, there is nothing in the novel that hadn't been done by someone for real.