“The Handmaid’s Tale” was written in the mid‑1980s and first published in 1985.

Margaret Atwood began writing the novel around the spring of 1984 while living in West Berlin, working through much of that year and into early 1985 before it went into proofs and then print. The book then appeared in Canada in the fall of 1985, followed shortly by editions in the UK and United States in early 1986, but 1985 is the key date usually given when people ask when it was written because that’s when the work was completed and first published.