Margaret Atwood Trivia
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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
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottawa on November 18, 1939, the second of three children; the family spent much of each year in the bush of northern Quebec, so she had only sporadic schooling before age 12.
Q 02What was Margaret Atwood's father's profession?
Entomologist
Her father, Carl Atwood, was a forest entomologist; his insect research took the family into the bush of northern Quebec and Ontario each spring and summer.
Q 03Which famous literary critic taught Margaret Atwood at Toronto's Victoria College?
Northrop Frye
Northrop Frye taught her at Victoria College; his 'garrison mentality' idea later shaped her 1972 critical study Survival, and 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
Radcliffe College, Harvard's women's college, awarded her an A.M. in 1962; she went on to Harvard doctoral work on 'The English Metaphysical Romance' but never finished the dissertation.
Q 05What was the title of Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry, published as a pamphlet in 1961?
Double Persephone
Double Persephone, a pamphlet she printed in 1961 under her own Hawkshead Press imprint, won the E. J. Pratt Medal; The Circle Game later took the Governor General's Award.
Q 06What was Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969?
The Edible Woman
The Edible Woman, written in 1965 and published in 1969, follows Marian MacAlpin, who gradually finds herself unable to eat; Atwood described the novel as 'protofeminist'.
Q 07Margaret Atwood's 1972 book Survival is a thematic guide to what?
Canadian literature
Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature argues that Canadian writing is organised around four 'victim positions', and it became a founding text of Canadian literary criticism.
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
The Handmaid's Tale appeared in 1985 from McClelland & Stewart and won that year's Governor General's Award for fiction; it was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize.
Q 10What is the name of the totalitarian state that replaces the United States in The Handmaid's Tale?
The Republic of Gilead
The Republic of Gilead is the theocratic regime that takes over the former United States after a coup kills the President and most of Congress and suspends the Constitution.
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
Handmaids wear red, the colour of blood and fertility, with white winged headdresses that box in their sight; every caste of women in Gilead has its own colour.
Q 13What is the name of the Commander's wife in The Handmaid's Tale?
Serena Joy
Q 21On which streaming service did Bruce Miller's The Handmaid's Tale series begin airing in 2017?
Hulu
Hulu premiered the series on April 26, 2017; created by Bruce Miller with Elisabeth Moss as Offred, it became the first streaming show to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series.
Q 22Which Margaret Atwood novel is about the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery?
Alias Grace
Alias Grace (1996) reimagines Grace Marks, the 16-year-old servant convicted over the Kinnear–Montgomery killings at Richmond Hill; Atwood invents a doctor who probes her lost memory of the crime.
Q 23Who directed the 2017 miniseries of Margaret Atwood's Grace Marks novel, adapted by Sarah Polley?
Mary Harron
Serena Joy, the Commander's Wife, was once a televised gospel singer and speaker who preached that women belonged in the home — long before Gilead turned that creed into law.
Q 14Which board game does the Commander secretly play with Offred in his library?
Scrabble
Scrabble is the game — a transgression in itself, since Gilead forbids women to read; during their secret evenings the Commander also gives Offred old magazines and hand lotion.
Q 15What is the name of the underground resistance network in The Handmaid's Tale?
Mayday
Mayday is the resistance network; Offred's shopping partner Ofglen belongs to it, while the Eyes are Gilead's secret police. The name echoes the French distress call m'aidez.
Q 16The novel's epilogue is a transcript of a historians' conference set in which year?
2195
The 'Historical Notes' record the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies, held at the University of Denay, Nunavit, on June 25, 2195, where Professor Pieixoto presents Offred's account.
Q 17In which city did Margaret Atwood begin writing The Handmaid's Tale in spring 1984?
West Berlin, Germany
She began the novel in West Berlin in spring 1984, where the Wall and trips into East Germany fed its sense of a watched society; she completed it in North America the following spring.
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
Speculative fiction is her label: it covers what could really happen with technology that already exists, whereas science fiction, she argued, deals in monsters and spaceships.
Q 20Which German director made the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter?
Volker Schlöndorff
Volker Schlöndorff, whose The Tin Drum won the 1979 Palme d'Or and the foreign-language Oscar, directed the 1990 film from Harold Pinter's screenplay; Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall co-starred.
Mary Harron, the Canadian director of American Psycho and I Shot Andy Warhol, directed all six episodes; it premiered on CBC in September 2017 before reaching Netflix worldwide.
Q 24For which novel did Margaret Atwood win her first Booker Prize, in 2000?
The Blind Assassin
The Blind Assassin, her tenth novel, won the 2000 Booker Prize; it nests a pulp science-fiction tale inside the memoir of an elderly Ontario narrator looking back on her sister's death.
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 Testaments picks up fifteen years after Offred's final scene and is told by three women: one Gilead insider and two girls raised on opposite sides of the border.
Q 29With which author did Margaret Atwood share the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments?
Bernardine Evaristo
Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize for Girl, Woman, Other, becoming the first Black woman to win the Booker; the judges split it despite a rule against joint winners adopted after 1992.
Q 30What remote robotic signing device did Margaret Atwood invent so she could skip book tours?
The LongPen
The LongPen lets an author sign a book remotely over a video link, a robotic arm reproducing the pen strokes; Atwood first demonstrated it at the London Book Fair in March 2006.