Lily James Announced As Special Guest For MARGARET ATWOOD LIVE In Cinemas

Fane Productions has announced Lily James as a special guest for Margaret Atwood Live on 10 September. The event, which takes place on the Lyttelton stage at The National Theatre, sold out within hours when it was first announced in March, but tickets are still available for over 1,300 live cinema screenings worldwide.

Margaret Atwood Live is a celebration of the global publication of the Booker-longlisted The Testaments, Margaret Atwood's highly anticipated sequel to her seminal work, The Handmaid's Tale. The live event will include readings, a Q&A between Margaret Atwood and Samira Ahmed, and the screening of never-before-seen footage from a documentary on Atwood's life and work.

Lily James, most recently seen on stage starring in Ivo van Hove's All About Eve, is currently lighting up cinema screens in Danny Boyle's movie Yesterday.

Alex Fane said: 'The Testaments is one of the most highly anticipated sequels of all time, and it's amazing to think that people all over the world will be able to mark the occasion by joining us in cinemas.'

Margaret Atwood: Live in Cinemas will be broadcast to over 1,300 cinemas across the globe, including cinemas throughout the UK, the US, Canada, Malta, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland plus delayed screenings in Australia, and New Zealand.

Full details and tickets can be found at www.margaretatwoodlive.com.

Margaret Atwood says 'I am delighted that the launch of The Testaments will take place not only in London on 10th September, but also by live-streaming to over 1300 cinemas around the world. I can't be in all the places at once in my analogue body, but I look forward to being with so many readers via the big screen.'

In addition to the live event there will be a midnight opening at Waterstones Piccadilly and a six date in-person tour across the UK and Ireland in October and November.

The publication of Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale in 1985 and the current, Emmy Award-winning television series have created a cultural phenomenon, as handmaids have become a symbol of women's rights and a protest against misogyny and oppression. In this brilliant sequel, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades. When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead. Margaret Atwood's sequel The Testaments picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

'Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in.' Margaret Atwood

The Testaments will be published by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of VINTAGE, on 10 September.

Fane Productions' live cinema broadcast is Executive Produced by David Sabel, the creator of National Theatre Live, with BY Experience, the New York based event cinema pioneer, global distribution representative of The Met: Live in HD and the global (ex-UK) distributor of National Theatre Live, distributing to cinemas, ex-UK. UK cinema distribution by National Theatre Live.

Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam Trilogy. Her 1985 classic The Handmaid's Tale went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against him; and the 2017 release of the award-winning Channel 4 TV series. Sales of the English language edition have now topped 8 million copies worldwide. Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.

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