97 Fun Facts About Margaret Atwood

In which Canadian city was Margaret Atwood born in 1939?

Ottawa was her birthplace, but the family passed all but the coldest months in the bush of northern Quebec and Ontario, so she did not attend school full-time until she was almost out of elementary school.

What was Margaret Atwood's father's profession?

An entomologist, Carl Atwood studied forest insects, and his research stations kept the family deep in the bush of northern Quebec and Ontario for all but the coldest months.

Which famous literary critic taught Margaret Atwood at Toronto's Victoria College?

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.

Where did Margaret Atwood earn her master's degree in 1962, on a Woodrow Wilson fellowship?

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.

What was the title of Margaret Atwood's first book of poetry, published as a pamphlet in 1961?

Double Persephone was a pamphlet she set and printed by hand in 1961 and sold for 50 cents a copy; The Circle Game, her first professionally published collection, won the Governor General's Award in 1966.

What was Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969?

The Edible Woman, written in the mid-1960s but not published until 1969, follows a newly engaged young woman who finds she can no longer eat.

Margaret Atwood's 1972 book Survival is a thematic guide to what?

Canadian literature, she argued, is ruled by the idea of survival, as American writing is by the frontier and English writing by the island: its heroes are the ones who make it back.

In The Handmaid's Tale, who scratched 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum' inside Offred's wardrobe?

Her predecessor, the Handmaid who had the room before, left the mock-Latin line and later killed herself; readers now send Atwood photographs of it tattooed on their bodies.

In The Handmaid's Tale, what is the name of Offred's husband, lost in their failed escape to Canada?

Luke had been married before, so Gilead voided the marriage and branded her an adulteress, which is how she was made a Handmaid and their daughter was taken away.

In The Handmaid's Tale, where are 'Unwomen' sent to clear toxic waste until they die?

The Colonies take defiant nuns, sterile women and Handmaids who fail to conceive, to clear up after war and chemical spills; a Handmaid who bears a healthy child is never sent there.

In Gilead, what colour do the Handmaids wear?

Red stands for the blood of childbirth, Atwood has said, and it also makes a Handmaid easy to spot if she runs; white bonnets complete the uniform.

What is the name of the Commander's wife in The Handmaid's Tale?

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.

Which board game does the Commander secretly play with Offred in his library?

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.

What is the name of the underground resistance network in The Handmaid's Tale?

Mayday counts Offred's shopping partner Ofglen as a member, and the men who take Offred away in the final scene may be its agents rather than the secret police.

The epilogue of The Handmaid's Tale is a transcript of what kind of event, held in 2195?

An academic conference on Gilead, long after the regime has fallen: a historian lectures on how Offred's account was found and doubts it can ever be authenticated.

In which city did Margaret Atwood begin writing The Handmaid's Tale in spring 1984?

West Berlin, Germany, was still ringed by the Wall when she began the novel there on a rented German-keyboard typewriter; she finished it in North America the following spring.

To which suspected ancestor, who survived a witchcraft hanging, did Atwood partly dedicate The Handmaid's Tale?

Mary Webster was strung up as a witch in Hadley, Massachusetts, and lived; Atwood's poem 'Half-Hanged Mary' is about her, and Atwood's grandmother claimed her as an ancestor on Mondays and denied it on Wednesdays.

How does Margaret Atwood prefer to classify The Handmaid's Tale and her MaddAddam books?

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.

Which German director made the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter?

Volker Schlöndorff had won the Palme d'Or and an Oscar with The Tin Drum, but his Handmaid's Tale, from a Harold Pinter script, opened to mixed reviews.

On which streaming service did Bruce Miller's The Handmaid's Tale series begin airing in 2017?

Hulu launched the series in April 2017 with Atwood on board as consulting producer, and it became the first streaming show to win the Emmy for best drama series.

In Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, the plague that wipes out most of humanity is hidden inside what product?

A libido pill called BlyssPluss, marketed around the world as a wonder drug, carried the virus; its inventor wanted humans gone to make room for the gentler species he had engineered.

Who directed the 2017 miniseries of Margaret Atwood's Grace Marks novel, adapted by Sarah Polley?

Mary Harron, who made American Psycho, directed all six episodes; Sarah Polley had announced the project in 2012 as a feature film before it grew into a miniseries for CBC and Netflix.

For which novel did Margaret Atwood win her first Booker Prize, in 2000?

The Blind Assassin hides its twist until late: the scandalous novel published under a dead woman's name was really written by her surviving sister, the narrator.

Which 2003 novel opened Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy?

Oryx and Crake opens after the catastrophe, with a lone survivor watching over a tribe of gentle engineered humans and recalling how his best friend ended the world.

Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad retells which epic from Penelope's point of view?

The Odyssey makes Penelope the model of the patient wife; Atwood lets her tell her own version of events, speaking as a spirit in the Underworld.

Margaret Atwood's 2016 novel Hag-Seed is a modern retelling of which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest becomes the story of a theatre director ousted by a scheming deputy, who takes a job teaching in a prison and stages the play there to trap his enemies.

In The Testaments, the teenager Daisy learns she is really which child, smuggled out of Gilead as an infant?

Baby Nicole is the infant whose return Gilead keeps demanding; once Daisy learns the truth, the resistance sends her back in disguise to bring out the regime's secrets.

With which author did Margaret Atwood share the 2019 Booker Prize for The Testaments?

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.

What remote robotic signing device did Margaret Atwood invent so she could skip book tours?

The LongPen misfired at its 2006 launch: Atwood appeared by video link from the London Book Fair, the device failed, and her New York audience's books had to be signed in London and posted.

Margaret Atwood's unread manuscript Scribbler Moon is sealed until 2114 in a library in which country?

Norway: a thousand trees planted outside Oslo in 2014 will be felled to print the Future Library's hundred manuscripts, a wait Atwood, its first author, likened to Sleeping Beauty's sleep.

What is the superhero comic Margaret Atwood began writing in 2016 with Johnnie Christmas called?

Angel Catbird, drawn by Johnnie Christmas for Dark Horse, stars the geneticist Strig Feleedus, who gains the traits of a cat and a bird after an accident with his own gene-splicing serum.

Which Canadian poet and stage performer is the subject of the chamber opera with Margaret Atwood's libretto?

Pauline Johnson is shown in her final days in Vancouver in March 1913; City Opera Vancouver staged Pauline in 2014, after Atwood had worked on the libretto on and off for about 15 years.

Margaret Atwood's 2008 Massey Lectures, later filmed as a documentary, were published under what title?

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth argues that debt is like air, ignored until things go wrong; it reached the shops in October 2008 just as the financial crisis filled the news.

Which fellow novelist was Margaret Atwood's partner from the 1970s until his death in September 2019?

Graeme Gibson, a novelist and devoted birdwatcher, died in London in September 2019, only days after The Testaments was launched there with a midnight event.

Where in Lake Erie does Margaret Atwood keep a summer home?

Pelee Island, the southernmost inhabited point in Canada, has been her summer base since 1987; she has written much of several books there and hosts a yearly dinner for its bird observatory.

In The Handmaid's Tale, the Handmaids' role copies which biblical wife, who had her maid Bilhah bear her husband's children?

Rachel, unable to conceive, gave her maid Bilhah to her husband and counted the children as her own; Gilead turns that passage of Genesis into a monthly ritual in every Commander's house.

Margaret Atwood was a founding trustee of which poetry prize, set up in 2000?

The Griffin Poetry Prize was set up by the businessman Scott Griffin, who recruited Atwood and Michael Ondaatje among its first trustees to raise poetry's public profile.

Which 1972 Atwood novel follows an unnamed narrator seeking her missing father in the Quebec wilderness?

Surfacing takes its narrator and three friends to her father's island cabin in the Quebec bush; finding his drowned body tips her into a spell of madness before she resurfaces.

Which Margaret Atwood novel follows a painter back to her childhood city, where memories of girlhood bullying overwhelm her?

Cat's Eye drew on Atwood's own move from a childhood in the bush to the more treacherous society of city schoolgirls; its narrator is haunted for life by one ringleader.

How does Margaret Atwood describe her politics, in what she calls the historical sense of the term?

A Red Tory, as she defines it, goes back to the 19th century, when 'the Tories were the ones who believed that those in power had a responsibility to the community'.

Which title, subtitled 'A Memoir of Sorts', did Margaret Atwood publish in November 2025?

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts runs to more than 600 pages, although Atwood had said in 2017 that she had no desire to write a memoir.

Which 1981 Atwood novel sends travel writer Rennie Wilford to a Caribbean island on the brink of revolution?

Bodily Harm grew out of Atwood's years of work with Amnesty International; its heroine arrives to write a travel piece while recovering from breast cancer.

The Handmaid's Tale won the first-ever edition of which science fiction prize, in 1987?

The Arthur C. Clarke Award began in 1987 with a grant from Clarke himself, to honour the best science-fiction novel published in Britain each year; Atwood's book was the first winner.

Margaret Atwood chose the title of The Handmaid's Tale partly in honour of which older work?

The Canterbury Tales, whose pilgrims each tell a Tale, was the model; Atwood made the change in January 1985, about 150 pages in, having called the book Offred until then.

What is the name of the radical group that overthrows the US government in The Handmaid's Tale?

The Sons of Jacob assassinate the President and most of Congress; the group's think tanks had worked out in advance how to seize power and how to reorder society afterwards.

In The Handmaid's Tale, what colour do the Marthas, the household servants, wear?

Green marks the Marthas, named for the Martha of the Gospels, who busied herself with the housework while her sister sat listening to Jesus.

Which actress narrates Aunt Lydia on the audiobook of Margaret Atwood's The Testaments?

Ann Dowd reads the part she plays on screen in the television series; Atwood herself and Derek Jacobi are also in the audiobook's cast.

The 15 sections of Alias Grace take their titles from what?

Quilt patterns title every section because the book is pieced together like a quilt, from letters, poems, newspaper reports and testimony set side by side.

In The Handmaid's Tale, what colour do the Commanders' Wives wear?

Blue is the Wives' colour, echoing the Virgin Mary's robes in traditional paintings; their unmarried daughters wear white instead.

In The Handmaid's Tale, what colour do the Aunts who train the Handmaids wear?

Brown marks the Aunts, infertile women spared exile in exchange for keeping the Handmaids in line and presiding at births and public executions.

Who is the Commander's chauffeur with whom Offred begins a secret relationship?

Nick lives over the garage, and Offred is first sent to him by the Commander's Wife herself, who hopes for a pregnancy; after that the two keep meeting on their own.

Which college friend of Offred's escapes Handmaid training by stealing an Aunt's clothes?

Moira walks out disguised as an Aunt and stays hidden for months before she is caught; Offred next meets her working in a secret brothel for Commanders.

According to the epilogue of The Handmaid's Tale, Offred's story was originally recorded on what?

Audio cassettes, about thirty of them, turned up in Maine long after Gilead fell; their finders had to guess the order of the tapes and could not prove who the speaker was.

In the epilogue of The Handmaid's Tale, which surname is put forward as the Commander's most likely real identity?

Waterford is the favoured candidate of two; he is said to have died in one of the regime's early purges, soon after Offred was taken from his house.

Which Harvard building houses Gilead's secret service in The Handmaid's Tale?

Widener Library, where Atwood studied as a Harvard graduate student, became in the novel the headquarters of the Eyes; the Wall where bodies hang is modelled on the wall around Harvard Yard.

Which Christian group runs an underground escape route to Canada in The Handmaid's Tale?

Quakers hide runaways along the Underground Femaleroad; Atwood later judged the escape too easy, writing that Gilead would surely have moved to eliminate them.

Who played Offred in the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale?

Natasha Richardson, daughter of Vanessa Redgrave, played Offred opposite Robert Duvall's Commander; she died in 2009 after a skiing accident at Mont Tremblant, Quebec.

The TV series calls Offred June, but what real name does the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale give her?

Kate is the film's invention; the novel never gives her name, and readers settled on June because it is the one name whispered in the dormitory that is never matched to another Handmaid.

The opera of The Handmaid's Tale, by the composer Poul Ruders, had its world premiere in 2000 in which capital?

Copenhagen came first because the Royal Danish Opera commissioned the work and wanted it sung in Danish, so its first audiences heard a translation of the English libretto.

Which dance company premiered a Handmaid's Tale adaptation in October 2013?

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet premiered Lila York's full-length version in October 2013 and took a revised version with a different score to the National Arts Centre in January 2015.

In which US city did Atwood finish writing The Handmaid's Tale in 1985?

Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was her home for four months in early 1985 while she held a visiting chair in the university's writing programme; the novel's copyright page thanks the department.

Which novelist friend was the first person to read The Handmaid's Tale manuscript?

Valerie Martin, a fellow novelist teaching at the same university, recalls telling her 'You are going to be rich'; Atwood remembers only 'I think you've got something here.'

Which actor plays Offred's Commander in the first season of the TV series of The Handmaid's Tale?

Joseph Fiennes, younger brother of Ralph, played the Commander through the first four seasons; the series makes him and his wife two of the regime's founders.

Which actress plays the Commander's Wife in the TV series of The Handmaid's Tale?

Yvonne Strahovski, born in Sydney and known for Chuck, plays the Commander's Wife as a former conservative activist and author who helped build the regime that then sidelined her.

Which actress, who played Emily, left The Handmaid's Tale ahead of its fifth season?

Alexis Bledel won a guest-actress Emmy in 2017 as Emily, the shopping partner who turns out to be far less pious than she seems; she left after four seasons.

Who won the 2017 lead-actress Emmy for playing Offred in the TV series of The Handmaid's Tale?

Elisabeth Moss had been nominated again and again as Peggy in Mad Men without winning; Offred brought her first Emmy, and a second that night as one of the show's producers.

In The Testaments, what was Aunt Lydia's profession before Gilead took over?

A judge: Lydia had risen from a poor childhood to the bench; after the coup she is held in a stadium, broken by torture and picked by Commander Judd to help design the women's order.

What is the name of the Aunts' headquarters in The Testaments?

Ardua Hall gives its name to the Ardua Hall Holograph, the secret manuscript in which Aunt Lydia sets down her plot against the regime she serves.

In The Testaments, in which Canadian city does the narrator Daisy grow up?

Toronto is where Daisy is raised by Neil and Melanie, whose second-hand clothing shop, the Clothes Hound, fronts for a network smuggling women out of Gilead.

In the MaddAddam trilogy, a rakunk is a genetic splice of which two animals?

Raccoon and skunk make the rakunk; Jimmy's is a birthday present named Killer, and his mother takes it with her when she flees the compound to join the underground.

In the MaddAddam books, pigoons are pigs engineered to grow what?

Human transplant organs grow inside the pigoons at OrganInc, where Jimmy's father works on the project; his mother objects to the splicing, and the quarrel strains their marriage before she walks out.

In Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, the scientist Glenn takes his code name from which online game?

Extinctathon, a trivia game about species that have died out, gives each player an animal code name; its best players later become the bioengineers on Glenn's secret project.

In the MaddAddam trilogy, Jimmy's post-pandemic alias is short for what?

The Abominable Snowman, the Yeti of legend, lends its name to Snowman, as Jimmy calls himself once he believes he is the last human left, guarding the gentle new species his friend designed.

Which eco-religious sect is at the centre of The Year of the Flood?

God's Gardeners, vegetarians who mix scripture with science, await a 'Waterless Flood' that will sweep humanity away; the hymns Atwood wrote for them were later set to music and released as an album.

Who narrates Atwood's 2000 Booker winner, recalling her sister Laura's life?

Iris Chase, an elderly Ontario widow, narrates; she is eventually revealed as the true author of the novel-within-the-novel published under her dead sister Laura's name.

Atwood's 2000 Booker winner is set partly in which Ontario town, home of the narrator's family firm?

Port Ticonderoga is Atwood's invention, a small southern Ontario town where the narrator and her sister grow up in a grand house called Avilion.

In Atwood's 2000 Booker winner, what does the family firm that made the narrator's fortune manufacture?

Buttons made the family rich under the narrator's grandfather; the New York Times reviewer found that setup promising and the rest of the Booker winner 'overlong and badly written'.

Atwood pulled her 2000 Booker winner from which award after joining its jury?

The Giller: Atwood sat on its 2000 jury, so she withdrew her own novel; the jury then split the prize between two other books, the first tie in its history.

In Lady Oracle (1976), which romance novelist fakes her own death and flees to Italy?

Joan Foster writes costume Gothics in secret; when a blackmailer threatens to expose her, she stages her own death, leaving behind a past that includes a Polish count and a lover called the Royal Porcupine.

In The Heart Goes Last, what scheme has residents spend alternate months in prison?

The Positron Project, run in the walled town of Consilience, has residents alternate monthly between civilian life and prison; each couple shares a house with an 'Alternate' couple who occupy it while they are locked up.

In Hag-Seed, under what alias does the ousted director Felix teach in a prison?

Mr. Duke is the name Felix takes to teach in the Literacy Through Literature programme at Fletcher County Correctional Institute; it nods to Prospero, the usurped Duke of Milan, whose revenge he means to copy.

Hag-Seed takes its title from a curse aimed at which Shakespeare character?

Caliban, whom Prospero calls 'hag-seed' as the son of the witch Sycorax; in Felix's prison production the role goes to an inmate called Leggs, while a hacker named 8Handz plays Ariel.

In The Robber Bride (1993), who fakes her death after betraying Tony, Charis and Roz?

Zenia, the glamorous manipulator who seduced each woman's partner, reappears at a restaurant years after her supposed death in Beirut; Atwood revived her in the 2014 story 'I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth'.

In The Penelopiad, who forms the Greek chorus that interrupts Penelope's story?

Twelve hanged maids form the chorus, the slave girls executed on the hero's return; their interludes change form each time, from a skipping rhyme and a sea shanty to an anthropology lecture and a court trial.

Which painter narrates Atwood's 1988 novel about a bullied childhood?

Elaine Risley comes home for a retrospective of her paintings and is pulled back into the years when her closest friends bullied her; as an adult she refuses the ringleader's plea for help.

In Atwood's 1988 novel about a painter's childhood, who leads the trio of girls who torment the narrator?

Cordelia leads the trio with Grace and Carol; in high school the power flips, and years later a hospitalised Cordelia begs the narrator to help her get out.

In an early Atwood novel, the heroine Marian MacAlpin works for what kind of company?

A market-research company, Seymour Surveys, has Marian revising questionnaires; Atwood took the setting from her own year at a survey firm in the early 1960s.

In Alias Grace, which young American doctor interviews Grace Marks to recover her lost memory of the murders?

Simon Jordan dreams of opening an asylum of his own; instead he becomes entangled with his landlady, leaves town without filing his report and goes home to join the Union Army.

After almost 30 years in Kingston Penitentiary, what became of Grace Marks, the real convict behind Alias Grace?

She was pardoned in 1872 and left for New York State; James McDermott, convicted with her of the same murder, had gone to the gallows nearly three decades earlier.

Who played Grace Marks in the 2017 CBC/Netflix miniseries?

Sarah Gadon, the Canadian star of Enemy and Maps to the Stars, played Grace; the prison scenes were shot inside the real Kingston Penitentiary, where Marks served almost thirty years.

Atwood's 1970 poetry cycle adopts the voice of which 19th-century settler-writer?

Susanna Moodie, author of the 1852 settler memoir Roughing It in the Bush, is the speaker of The Journals of Susanna Moodie; its third journal has her voice rising from the grave to address 1969 Canada.

Margaret Atwood once flippantly summed up science fiction on BBC television as what?

'Talking squids in outer space' was her BBC Breakfast shorthand for the genre she said she did not write; Ursula K. Le Guin answered in print that Atwood's novels do exactly what science fiction does.

What was the profession of Atwood's mother, Margaret Killam?

A dietitian by training, Margaret Killam spent the family's long seasons in the bush getting school workbooks for her children, who learned that finishing them fast meant going out to play sooner.

In her cameo in the pilot of The Handmaid's Tale TV series, Atwood plays what kind of Gilead figure?

An Aunt: Atwood appears in the first episode as one of the women who train the Handmaids and slaps Offred across the face; she was also the show's consulting producer.

With which Indian author did Atwood accept the $1,000,000 Dan David Prize in 2010?

Amitav Ghosh, author of The Glass Palace and the Ibis trilogy, shared the 2010 prize with her; both went to Tel Aviv University to accept it despite public calls for a boycott.

What was the original name of the company Atwood founded to develop her remote-signing device?

Unotchit Inc. was set up in 2004 with her stepson as co-founder; it later turned from book signings to business and legal documents and renamed itself Syngrafii.

What was Atwood's 2018 Globe and Mail op-ed defending her stance on due process called?

'Am I a Bad Feminist?' ran in the Globe and Mail in January 2018 after Atwood was attacked for signing the 2016 UBC Accountable letter, which demanded a fair process for dismissed professor Steven Galloway.