Margaret Atwood: Covid-19 lockdown is not a dystopia

The Handmaid’s Tale author says ‘people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism’

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Margaret Atwood, who has created dystopias from Gilead to the collapsed civilisation of Oryx and Crake, has spoken: our locked-down world might be “an unpleasant, frightening, disagreeable place you don’t want to be”, but it is not dystopian.

Speaking to BBC Radio 5 Live’s Emma Barnett, Atwood said that “a dystopia, technically, is an arranged unpleasant society that you don’t want to be living in. This one was not arranged. So people may be making arrangements that aren’t too pleasant, but it’s not a deliberate totalitarianism. It’s not a deliberate arrangement.”

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