100 free Margaret Atwood trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Margaret Atwood trivia quiz covers the Canadian novelist, poet and occasional inventor from her childhood in the Quebec backwoods to the joint Booker Prize for The Testaments. It starts with her early life, her professors at Victoria College, her first poetry pamphlet and her first novel, The Edible Woman, then works through the 1970s and 80s books, her theory of Canadian literature in Survival, and her long partnership with Graeme Gibson. The centre of the quiz is The Handmaid's Tale: the Republic of Gilead, the colour-coded clothing, Offred and Serena Joy, the Scrabble games, the historical-conference epilogue, the West Berlin typewriter, the 1990 film, the opera and the Emmy-winning Hulu series. There are also questions on Alias Grace and its real 1843 murder case, The Blind Assassin, the MaddAddam trilogy, The Penelopiad, Hag-Seed, the Angel Catbird comics, the LongPen remote-signing robot, and Scribbler Moon, the novel nobody can read until 2114. Difficulty ranges from easy to expert. Every answer was checked against the Wikipedia articles on Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Canadian city was Margaret Atwood born on November 18, 1939?
Ottawa
Because her father was a forest entomologist, she spent much of her childhood in the backwoods of northern Quebec and did not attend school full-time until she was 12.
Q 02What was Margaret Atwood's father's profession?
Entomologist
His insect research kept the family moving between Ottawa, Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto, and she began writing plays and poems at six.
Q 03Which famous literary critic taught Margaret Atwood at Toronto's Victoria College?
Northrop Frye
His idea of Canada's 'garrison mentality' later shaped her own book of criticism, Survival; she graduated in 1961 with honours in English.
Q 04Where did Margaret Atwood earn her master's degree in 1962, on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship?
Radcliffe College
She went on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship, studied the Puritans there, and never finished her dissertation on 'The English Metaphysical Romance'.
Q 05What was the title of Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry, published as a pamphlet in 1961?
Double Persephone
It won the E. J. Pratt Medal; The Circle Game followed in 1966 and took the Governor General's Award.
Q 06What was Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969?
The Edible Woman
A satire of North American consumerism, she called it 'social realism' rather than feminism; its heroine Marian stops eating meat after hearing about a rabbit hunt.
Q 07Margaret Atwood's 1972 book Survival is a thematic guide to what?
Canadian literature
It argues that Canadian writing is defined by 'victim positions' and remains a standard introduction in Canadian studies courses worldwide.
Q 08In 1976, which magazine declared Margaret Atwood 'Canada's most gossiped-about writer'?
Maclean's
That decade she published six poetry collections and the novels Surfacing, Lady Oracle and Life Before Man.
Q 09In what year was The Handmaid's Tale first published?
1985
It won that year's Governor General's Award and the first ever Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was a Booker finalist in 1986.
Q 10What is the name of the totalitarian state that replaces the United States in The Handmaid's Tale?
The Republic of Gilead
It is founded by the Sons of Jacob after they assassinate the President and most of Congress.
Q 11How is 'Offred', the narrator's designation, constructed?
From 'of' plus the first name of her household's Commander
Handmaids' names change whenever they are moved to a new household; the role is modelled on Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah in Genesis.
Q 12In Gilead, what colour do the Handmaids wear?
Red
Wives wear blue, Aunts brown, Marthas green, and Econowives stripes of all three.
Q 13What is the name of the Commander's wife in The Handmaid's Tale?
Serena Joy
She is a former Christian media personality who preached women's domesticity long before Gilead existed.
Q 21On which streaming service did Bruce Miller's The Handmaid's Tale series begin airing in 2017?
Hulu
Its first season won eight Emmys including Outstanding Drama Series, and Atwood was later nominated as a producer.
Q 22Which Margaret Atwood novel is about the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery?
Alias Grace
It won the 1996 Giller Prize; Atwood had already written a 1974 CBC TV film, The Servant Girl, about the convicted servant Grace Marks.
Q 23Who directed the 2017 miniseries of Margaret Atwood's Grace Marks novel, adapted by Sarah Polley?
Mary Harron
It premiered on CBC before landing on Netflix, and Atwood cameos in episode four as a disapproving churchgoer.
Q 14Which board game does the Commander secretly play with Offred in his library?
Scrabble
Women in Gilead are forbidden to read, which makes the word game a transgression; he also gives her lingerie and takes her to a state-run brothel.
Q 15What is the name of the underground resistance network in The Handmaid's Tale?
Mayday
Offred learns her shopping partner Ofglen belongs to it; the Eyes are Gilead's secret police.
Q 16The novel's epilogue is a transcript of a historians' conference set in which year?
2195
The keynote speaker reveals Offred's story was found on audio cassettes and admits the account is hard to authenticate.
Q 17In which city did Margaret Atwood begin writing The Handmaid's Tale in spring 1984?
West Berlin, Germany
She finished it in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where she held an MFA chair; the story is set in what used to be Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Q 18To which suspected ancestor, who survived a witchcraft hanging, did Atwood partly dedicate The Handmaid's Tale?
Mary Webster
Her grandmother would claim the 17th-century Webster as an ancestor on Mondays and deny it on Wednesdays; the poem 'Half-Hanged Mary' is about her too.
Q 19How does Margaret Atwood prefer to classify The Handmaid's Tale and her MaddAddam books?
Speculative fiction
'Science fiction has monsters and spaceships; speculative fiction could really happen,' she told the Guardian, and dismissed sci-fi as 'talking squids in outer space'.
Q 20Which German director made the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter?
Volker Schlöndorff
It got mixed reviews; a Poul Ruders opera followed in 2000 at the Royal Danish Opera.
Q 24For which novel did Margaret Atwood win her first Booker Prize, in 2000?
The Blind Assassin
Her tenth novel also took the Hammett Prize; she was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame the following year.
Q 25Which 2003 novel opened Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy?
Oryx and Crake
The trilogy imagines genetically engineered creatures like pigoons, rakunks and wolvogs; she insists it contains no technology that is not already possible in theory.
Q 26Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad retells which epic from Penelope's point of view?
The Odyssey
It was written for the Canongate Myth Series and staged as a play in 2007.
Q 27Margaret Atwood's 2016 novel Hag-Seed is a modern retelling of which Shakespeare play?
The Tempest
It was part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare series.
Q 28How many years after Offred's final scene is The Testaments set?
Fifteen
The 2019 sequel has three female narrators and was announced on November 28, 2018.
Q 29With which author did Margaret Atwood share the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments?
Bernardine Evaristo
Evaristo won for Girl, Woman, Other; The Testaments also won the Goodreads Choice Award for fiction by more than 50,000 votes.
Q 30What remote robotic signing device did Margaret Atwood invent so she could skip book tours?
The LongPen
She conceived it in Denver in 2004 on the Oryx and Crake paperback tour and founded Unotchit Inc., later renamed Syngrafii, to build it.