Margaret Atwood’s dystopian story is about the oppression of women. In some places, the book has already been banned from school curricula and libraries.
A “non-combustible” edition of the book “The Handmaid’s Report” by Canadian author Margaret Atwood (82) fetched around $ 130,000 (about 120,000 euros) at an auction in New York.
The auction house Sotheby’s announced that the proceeds from the sale will be donated to the authors’ association PEN America. It was not initially disclosed who bought the work. Atwood was quoted as saying that she was delighted that the auction had raised so much money.
With the auction, the auction house, the publisher Penguin Random House and the author want to protest against the banning of certain books, for example from curricula in the USA. Atwood was quoted as saying before the auction that “The Report of the Maid” had also been banned several times, at least temporarily, in some countries or from some libraries.
She had tried to burn the fireproof version herself with a flamethrower – without success. The book, which was first published in 1985 and has also been successfully filmed several times, is a dystopian story about a dictatorship in which women in particular are oppressed.
