Literary icon Margaret Atwood on why The Handmaid's Tale no longer feels like fiction
Two-time Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood tells France 24 her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale now feels closer to reality, citing US book bans, reproductive rights rollbacks, and the Trump era. The interview coincides with her new memoir, Book of Lives.
Intelligence analysis by Llama
Margaret Atwood, speaking at Porto's Babell literary festival, reflects on why The Handmaid's Tale reads less like fiction in 2026, touching on US book bans, reproductive rights, and her new memoir.
Margaret Atwood wrote a scary book in 1985 about a place where women lost their freedom, and people thought it was just make-believe. Now she says some of those things are starting to happen for real, especially in the United States, where some books are being banned and rules about women's bodies are changing. She also wrote a new book about her own life, kind of like a diary, to remind everyone that stories and ideas are hard to keep quiet once they exist.
Analysis
When Fiction Stops Being a Warning Shot
Margaret Atwood has long insisted that everything in The Handmaid's Tale happened somewhere, sometime — she has called it speculative fiction grounded in historical record rather than imagination. The France 24 interview, conducted by Eve Jackson at Porto's Babell literary festival, makes that argument explicit. Atwood points to expanding book bans in the United States, the rollback of reproductive rights, and the political climate under President Donald Trump as evidence that the Republic of Gilead, her fictional theocratic regime, no longer reads as a far-fetched cautionary tale. The framing is striking: a novelist who spent decades being told her dystopia was unrealistic is now being asked, by readers and interviewers alike, what it felt like to watch reality catch up. Atwood's answer, according to France 24's arts24 segment, is characteristically sharp — she treats the question less as personal vindication and more as a diagnosis of where democratic societies can drift when vigilance lapses.
Burning Books Has Never Worked
A particularly vivid moment in the interview is Atwood's account of torching an "unburnable" edition of The Handmaid's Tale — a special print run produced to resist fire, a project conceived as a direct rebuke to censorship. The gesture is theatrical, almost defiantly so, but Atwood uses it to make a quieter point: banning books has historically failed to silence the ideas inside them. The conversation situates US book bans within that longer arc, suggesting that the current wave is part of a recurring cycle rather than an unprecedented rupture. France 24 frames the segment as a global story, not a domestic American one, by airing it from a Portuguese literary festival and pairing it with discussion of reproductive rights — issues that have moved in different directions across Europe and North America. The implicit message is that what happens in US libraries and courtrooms is being watched carefully abroad, and read through the lens Atwood herself helped create.
A Memoir as Counter-Evidence
The interview lands alongside the publication of Atwood's memoir, Book of Lives, which she describes as a deeply personal reflection on her Canadian childhood, her literary career, and her long partnership with writer Graeme Gibson. The memoir's timing is not incidental. Pairing an intimate life story with a public conversation about censorship and rights gives the arts24 segment a dual register: a defense of the personal, interior life as the soil from which dissent grows. Atwood's engagement with tarot, astrology, and palm-reading in the interview's lighter final segment reinforces that point — it is the curiosity and playfulness of an author who treats ideas, even dangerous ones, as things to be entertained rather than suppressed. For global viewers, the segment functions less as book promotion than as a reminder that the most durable resistance to authoritarian drift is often cultural, and that the writers documenting it are not warning about a future so much as naming a present.
Key points
- Two-time Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood told France 24 her 1985 novel The Handmaid's Tale now feels less fictional amid US book bans, reproductive rights rollbacks, and the Trump era.
- Atwood discussed torching an 'unburnable' special edition of the novel, a project conceived as a rebuke to censorship.
- The interview took place at Porto's Babell literary festival and aired on France 24's arts24 program.
- The segment coincides with the release of Atwood's memoir, Book of Lives, covering her Canadian childhood, literary career, and partnership with writer Graeme Gibson.
- Atwood argued that banning books has historically failed to silence the ideas inside them.
