‘Never say never’: Margaret Atwood on writing more Handmaid’s Tale sequels after The Testaments

After years of turning down requests to write a sequel to her bestseller, Atwood recently published The Testaments

Growing similarities between her fictional totalitarian state and the United States, given the anti-abortion laws recently passed, led her to write the book

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Margaret Atwood talks about why she finally released The Testaments, the sequel to the award-winning 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:00am, 12 Sep 2019Updated: 4:37am, 12 Sep 2019

The growing similarities between the United States and her fictional regime of Gilead, where women’s bodies are policed by a totalitarian state, helped prompt Margaret Atwood into writing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale , the author has said.

The Testaments was released worldwide this week, 34 years after the story of Offred ended in the first book. Speaking about it publicly for the first time, Atwood said that there had been “many requests for a sequel” over the intervening years, but she “always said no”.

“However, as time moved on, instead of moving further away from Gilead we moved towards it, particularly in the US, and I re-examined that position,” says the 79-year-old novelist.

“I decided that although I could not continue with the story of Offred, I could continue with three other people and tell the story of the beginning of the end. We know from The Handmaid’s Tale that Gilead vanishes, it’s no longer present 200 years later because we’re having a symposium on it …

“So how did it collapse? How do these kinds of regimes disappear? I was interested in exploring that and also what it would be like for the second generation.”

She sent a two-paragraph summary to her publishers in February 2017. The acclaimed television adaptation, which the novelist reads scripts for, but claims to have “no actual power” over, began in April that year.