Author Bio

Margaret Atwood was born November 18th, 1939 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Her father Carl Atwood was a professor and her mother Margaret Killam was a nutritionist. Due to her father’s studies in zoology and entomology, the Atwood family would spend half of each year removed from society in the surrounding woods of Ontario, where her father studied the damage insects inflicted upon Canadian forests. This early connection with environmentalism carried through Atwood's childhood and into her written work. A recurring aspect of The Handmaid’s Tale is the devastation wrought on the environment by humans, pollution and nuclear radiation has rendered large portions of America and its human inhabitants infertile, leading to food shortages and an extremely low birth rate. In addition to their unconventional living situation, Atwood’s family had a very modern dynamic, in that both her parents shared domestic duties and her mother had no issue with the rugged necessities of their life in the forest. Through her parents, Atwood was instilled with a certainty that women were equal to men and to not blindly follow societally imposed limitations of her gender. This would lead to her pursuing a higher education in writing. In 1961, after her schooling finished, she published her first book, a collection of poems entitled Double Persephone. She would continue to publish narrative texts and it was during a stint in Berlin in the mid 1980s that she began work on The Handmaid’s Tale, partially inspired by works such as Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. Atwood stated that for years she felt that the premise of The Handmaid's Tale was too ridiculous, until she began noticing that “a lot of the things I thought I was more or less making up were now happening”. Midway through the book’s completion, she returned to Canada, where she finished the novel. After two years of steady work, The Handmaid's Tale was published in February, 1986. Despite the controversy, The Handmaid’s Tale was largely well-received and won the Governor General’s Award in 1986.
Atwood has little to say about the controversies surrounding The Handmaid’s Tale, beyond that during the writing process she "did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behavior.” To achieve this, she purposefully chose only pre-existing cultural behaviors as the basis for her dystopia and only things that could be achieved with available technology, making this future have a chilling sense of realism.