Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale voted top book men should read written by a woman

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (Vintage) has been voted the top book written by a woman which men should read. 

The public vote was part of a campaign run by the Women’s Prize for Fiction aiming to encourage more men to read novels by female writers. It was born out of statistical research in Mary Ann Sieghart’s book The Authority Gap (Amazon), which demonstrated that whilet women read novels by men and women almost equally, fiction written by women is rarely read by men. 

Sieghart, who is the chair of judges for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, found that for the top 10 bestselling female fiction authors, who include Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes, only 19% of their readers are men, based on data from Nielsen BookData. In comparison, for the top 10 bestselling male authors, who include Charles Dickens and J R R Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King, the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women.  

The Women’s Prize asked former Women’s Prize for Fiction judges and male writers and celebrities, including Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Richard Curtis, Andrew Marr, Simon Mayo, Ardal O’Hanlon, Anthony Horowitz, Simon Schama, Justin Webb and Sanjeev Bhaskar, for their recommendations of novels written by women. This list was presented to the public who were then invited to vote for their "Top Ten Men’s Reading List". 

More than 20,000 votes were cast from 29th May to 6th June, and saw Atwood take the top spot. She was followed by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (Arrow), Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize-winner Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton), Alice Walker’s The Colour Purple (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (Bloomsbury). 

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (Fourth Estate) polled sixth, followed by Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch (Abacus), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (Penguin Classics), Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible (Faber) and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half (Dialogue Books).  

Atwood said she was “honoured” to win. “There was no Women’s Prize for Fiction at the time I wrote The Handmaid’s Tale but it was true then as now that many male readers shied away from books by women (except for murders and fantasies with wizards) and may also have felt excluded from them. It was normal for men to say to me, ‘My wife just loves your books’, a double-edged compliment.  

“But The Handmaid’s Tale is not about men vs women. It’s about a totalitarianism – it is not a paradise for all men, any more than any totalitarianism is. All totalitarianisms control women in specific ways having to do with reproduction. Take note in light of current events in the US: the state’s claim to ownership of women’s bodies will also affect men.”