Which author wrote 'The Handmaid's Tale'?

Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, her landmark dystopian novel first published in 1985. The book is narrated by Offred, a woman forced into reproductive servitude in the theocratic state of Gilead.

Atwood’s story imagines a near-future New England in which the United States government has been overthrown and women’s rights have been dismantled. Fertile women known as Handmaids are assigned to powerful households and compelled to bear children for elite couples. The novel explores authoritarianism, religious extremism, control of language, and the fragility of personal identity.

Atwood has said that the novel’s events were grounded in historical practices and real political patterns rather than invented from nothing. That approach gives the speculative story its unsettling realism. The book’s title also echoes Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, framing Offred’s testimony as a story preserved and interpreted by others.

A common mix-up is attributing the novel to Octavia Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, or Doris Lessing, all major writers associated with speculative or feminist literature. Atwood later returned to Gilead in The Testaments, published in 2019, which won the Booker Prize and serves as a companion sequel.