Margaret Atwood’s best-seller The Handmaid’s Tale has landed the top spot on the “top 10 men’s reading list” of books written by women following a public vote.
News Chain reports that the poll was part of a Women’s Prize for Fiction campaign aiming to encourage more men to read novels by female authors.
The campaign, the online outlet adds, was inspired following the release of Mary Ann Sieghart’s best-selling book The Authority Gap which revealed men rarely read a fiction novel written by a woman.
Sir Salman Rushdie, Andrew Marr and Richard Curtis were among those who recommended novels written by women for the “top 10 men’s reading list” before a public vote.
Following 20,000 votes, dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tail topped the list followed by Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo.
Atwood said: “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…”
“The campaign comes five days before the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction is set to be announced at an evening awards ceremony in central London.
