Emma heeft voor Entertainment Weekly schrijfster Margaret Atwood over haar boek The Handmaid’s Tale. De boek is nu recent verfilmd in gelijknamige serie op streamingsdienst Hulu.

Many celebrities have book clubs, but none share the clout of Emma Watson’s “Our Shared Shelf,” which has picked up nearly 200,000 members since it launched on Goodreads in 2016. As Watson wrote when she made The Handmaid’s Tale her May/June selection, “It is a book that has never stopped fascinating readers because it articulates so vividly what it feels like for a woman to lose power over her own body.” Thanks to the recent Hulu series, Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel has again soared to the top of the best-seller lists. Watson called up Atwood to discuss.

Watson: You were living in West Berlin when you wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984; it was before the wall came down. Was being in a divided city a big influence on the novel or had you been thinking about it before you arrived in Berlin? I’d love to know how the novel came about.
Atwood: I had been thinking about it before I’d arrived, and at that time — when I was in West Berlin—I also visited Czechoslovakia and East Germany and Poland. They weren’t revelations, because being as old as I am I knew about life behind the Iron Curtain, but it was very interesting to be right inside, to sense the atmosphere. East Germany was the most repressed, Czechoslovakia the second, and Poland was relatively wide open, which explains why Poland was where the Cold War wall first cracked. So it was very interesting to be there, but it wasn’t the primary inspiration.

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