100 Fun Facts About Margaret Atwood

In which Canadian city was Margaret Atwood born on November 18, 1939?

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.

What was Margaret Atwood's father's profession?

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.

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, 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.

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

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'.

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

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.

In 1976, which magazine declared Margaret Atwood 'Canada's most gossiped-about writer'?

That decade she published six poetry collections and the novels Surfacing, Lady Oracle and Life Before Man.

In what year was The Handmaid's Tale first published?

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.

What is the name of the totalitarian state that replaces the United States in The Handmaid's Tale?

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.

How is 'Offred', the narrator's designation, constructed?

Handmaids' names change whenever they are moved to a new household; the role is modelled on Rachel and her handmaid Bilhah in Genesis.

In Gilead, what colour do the Handmaids wear?

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.

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 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.

The novel's epilogue is a transcript of a historians' conference set in which year?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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, 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.

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

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.

Which Margaret Atwood novel is about the 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and Nancy Montgomery?

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Which 2003 novel opened Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy?

The trilogy imagines genetically engineered creatures like pigoons, rakunks and wolvogs; she insists it contains no technology that is not already possible in theory.

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

It was written for the Canongate Myth Series and staged as a play in 2007.

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

It was part of Penguin Random House's Hogarth Shakespeare series.

How many years after Offred's final scene is The Testaments set?

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.

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 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.

Under the Future Library project, Atwood's Scribbler Moon will not be published until when?

Scribbler Moon will appear in 2114, when Katie Paterson's Future Library prints a century of sealed manuscripts on paper from a Norwegian forest planted in 2014; Atwood handed hers over in 2015.

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 writer-performer, who died in 1913, is the subject of the chamber opera with Margaret Atwood's libretto?

Pauline Johnson, the Mohawk-English poet who performed as Tekahionwake, is the subject of the opera Pauline; Tobin Stokes composed it and City Opera Vancouver premiered it at the York Theatre in May 2014.

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

Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth collected the 2008 Massey Lectures; Jennifer Baichwal's 2012 documentary of it weaves in an Albanian blood feud and the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Which CBC children's series from 2017 was adapted from a Margaret Atwood picture book?

The Wide World of Wandering Wenda, an animated CBC Kids series from 2017, grew out of her 2011 alliterative picture book Wandering Wenda and Widow Wallop's Wunderground Washery.

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

Graeme Gibson, author of Five Legs and Perpetual Motion, was her partner from 1973; their daughter Jess was born in 1976 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario, and her 2020 collection Dearly mourns him.

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

Pelee Island, Canada's southernmost inhabited point, is where Atwood has long kept a summer home; a devoted birder, she helped establish the Pelee Island Bird Observatory there.

How does Margaret Atwood describe her own diet?

'I'm allowing myself gastropods, crustaceans and the occasional fish. Nothing with fur or feathers though,' she said in 2009.

Which two literary organisations did Margaret Atwood help found?

The Griffin Poetry Prize and the Writers' Trust of Canada both count Atwood among their founders: she was a founding trustee of the Griffin in 2000 and helped start the Writers' Trust in 1976.

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

Surfacing (1972) sends its unnamed narrator back to the island of her childhood in northern Quebec to search for her vanished father; it became a touchstone of Canadian nationalist and feminist criticism.

Which 1988 Margaret Atwood novel, a 1989 Booker finalist, is often read for autobiographical clues?

Cat's Eye (1988) follows a middle-aged painter who returns to the city of her childhood for a retrospective and relives a girlhood friendship that turned cruel; readers have long mined it for Atwood's own life.

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

A Red Tory, she says — in the old Canadian sense of a conservative who accepts a strong public sector; in 2008 she spoke at a Bloc Québécois event to protest federal arts cuts.

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

Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts appeared in November 2025, five years after her poetry collection Dearly; Atwood was 85 when it was published.

Which 1981 Atwood novel sends journalist Rennie Wilford to a Caribbean island during a coup?

Bodily Harm (1981) follows Rennie Wilford, a lifestyle journalist recovering from cancer surgery, to the fictional Caribbean island of St. Antoine, where a coup lands her in jail.

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

The Arthur C. Clarke Award, Britain's prize for the year's best science-fiction novel, went to The Handmaid's Tale at its inaugural 1987 presentation; the book was also a Nebula and Booker finalist.

The title of The Handmaid's Tale echoes the structure of which medieval work?

The Canterbury Tales is the echo: Chaucer's collection includes The Merchant's Tale and The Parson's Tale, and Atwood's title also nods to fairy tales in which a heroine tells her own story.

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

The Sons of Jacob, a Christian fundamentalist movement, stage the coup that kills the President and most of Congress, suspend the Constitution and impose a theonomic military regime.

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

Marthas wear dull green, which Offred likens to a surgeon's gown from before Gilead; they are the household cooks and cleaners, named after the busy sister of Mary in Luke's Gospel.

Which actress narrates Aunt Lydia on the audiobook of The Testaments, released alongside the novel?

Atwood said Dowd's TV performance as Lydia helped inspire the sequel; Bryce Dallas Howard reads Agnes.

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

Quilt patterns such as Jagged Edge, Broken Dishes and Pandora's Box title the novel's sections; Grace sews throughout her interviews, and quilting becomes Atwood's image of pieced-together memory.

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.

What colour do the Aunts, who train the Handmaids, wear?

Brown marks the Aunts, who carry electric cattle prods at the Red Center; they are the only women in Gilead permitted to read and write, and only for the paperwork of their job.

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

He lives above the garage and smokes, a forbidden habit; the epilogue hints he was in the resistance and helped Offred escape.

Which college friend of Offred's escapes the Red Center by stealing an Aunt's clothes?

Moira, Offred's outspoken college friend, overpowers Aunt Elizabeth in a washroom and walks out of the Red Center in her uniform; Offred later finds her working at the Jezebel's brothel.

According to the novel's epilogue, Offred's story was originally recorded on what?

Audio cassettes — about thirty, hidden in an army footlocker in Bangor, Maine — held Offred's story; Professor Pieixoto's team transcribed them two centuries later and could not fully authenticate them.

In the epilogue, the professor believes the Commander was a man with what surname?

Frederick R. Waterford was supposedly killed in a purge soon after Offred was taken, charged with harbouring an enemy agent.

Which Harvard building is the secret-service headquarters of Gilead in the novel?

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 run the escape route in the novel, consistent with their role on the 19th-century Underground Railroad; Gilead's other enemies include Baptist guerrillas in the hills and Catholic priests, who are hanged.

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.

What real name is Offred given in the 1990 film adaptation?

Kate is the name the 1990 film gives her; the novel never reveals it, and the 2017 series chose June, the one name from the Red Center's whispered roll-call never matched to another Handmaid.

Which Danish composer wrote the opera of The Handmaid's Tale that premiered in 2000?

Poul Ruders composed it to Paul Bentley's English libretto; it premiered at the Royal Danish Theatre in Copenhagen on March 6, 2000, sung in Danish translation.

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

The Royal Winnipeg Ballet commissioned Lila York's full-length ballet of the novel and premiered it in Winnipeg in October 2013; Renée Nault's graphic-novel version followed in 2019.

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

Tuscaloosa is home to the University of Alabama, where Atwood held the visiting MFA chair in creative writing that spring and typed out the final pages of the novel.

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

Atwood remembers mild praise; Martin remembers telling her 'you're about to be rich!'

Which actor plays Commander Fred in the 2017 TV series of The Handmaid's Tale?

Joseph Fiennes, younger brother of Ralph, played Commander Fred until the character was beaten to death at the end of season four; Bradley Whitford's Commander Lawrence also became a series regular.

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, who won an Emmy for the role in 2017, announced in May 2022 that she had to step away; her Emily had been June's first shopping partner and first link to the resistance.

How many Primetime Emmys did the first season of The Handmaid's Tale win in 2017?

Eight Emmys went to the first season in 2017, including Outstanding Drama Series and Lead Actress for Elisabeth Moss; in 2021 the show set the opposite record, 21 nominations and no wins.

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

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

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

Aunt Lydia's secret manuscript is later published as the Ardua Hall Holograph, one of the three documents the title refers to.

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, a docile pet splice bred without the skunk's smell; Jimmy's mother takes his beloved rakunk Killer with her when she flees the compound for the underground.

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

Human transplant organs — hearts, kidneys, livers — are grown inside the pigoons at OrganInc Farms, where Jimmy's father works; by the end of the trilogy they are clever enough to negotiate a truce.

In the first MaddAddam novel, Glenn takes the name Crake from which online game?

Extinctathon, an online trivia game about vanished species, gives players extinct-animal code names; Glenn's was Crake, and he later recruits his bioengineers from among the game's grandmasters.

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

The Abominable Snowman — Jimmy calls himself Snowman after the legendary creature, 'existing and not existing'; in the extinction game his code name had been Thickney, an Australian bird said to haunt cemeteries.

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

God's Gardeners, the vegetarian sect led by Adam One, keep a calendar of saints such as Dian Fossey and Rachel Carson and tend the Edencliff Rooftop Garden in the pleeblands.

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 fictional Ontario town?

Port Ticonderoga, a fictional button-factory town in southern Ontario, is the narrator's home; the Depression-era strike at her father's factory sets the novel's tragedy in motion.

Which magazine named The Blind Assassin the best novel of 2000?

Time magazine named it the best novel of 2000 and later placed it on its All-TIME 100 list of the greatest English-language novels published since 1923.

Atwood pulled The Blind Assassin from which 2000 award after joining its jury?

The Giller Prize: Atwood sat on its 2000 jury, so she withdrew her own novel from contention; the book went on to win the Booker and the Hammett Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

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

Joan Foster, who writes Gothic romances under a pen name, stages her drowning in Lake Ontario and hides in an Italian village; her past 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 uses at Fletcher County Correctional Institute, where he runs a literacy-through-theatre program; the alias teases his own exiled-Prospero role in the play he plans.

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?

The twelve maids Odysseus had hanged form the chorus; their interludes shift genre with every appearance — a skipping rhyme, a sea shanty, an anthropology lecture, even a videotaped trial of Odysseus.

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

Elaine Risley, a painter in her fifties, returns for a retrospective of her work and is flooded by memories of childhood bullying; a red plastic purse holding a childhood marble unlocks them.

In Cat's Eye, who leads the trio of girls who torment the narrator as a child?

Cordelia leads the tormenting trio with Grace Smeath and Carol Campbell; in high school the power flips, and at their last meeting a hospitalised Cordelia begs the narrator to help her get out.

In Atwood's first novel, what does Marian bake and dare her fiancé Peter to eat?

A cake shaped like a woman, pink-iced and lovingly decorated, is Marian's challenge to Peter; when he leaves in disgust her appetite returns and she eats the cake herself.

Which fictional doctor interviews Grace Marks in Atwood's 1996 novel?

Simon Jordan, a young American doctor hoping to open a private asylum, interviews Grace to probe her memory; he flees Kingston after an affair with his landlady and is later wounded serving in the Union Army.

Which 1974 CBC television film did Atwood write about Grace Marks?

The Servant Girl, directed by George Jonas for CBC in 1974, drew on a Victorian memoirist's lurid account of the case; by 1996 Atwood had concluded that account was partly invented and rethought Grace.

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.

Atwood famously dismissed science fiction as what, to the annoyance of SF fans?

'Talking squids in outer space' was her flip BBC description of science fiction in 2003; after Ursula K. Le Guin objected, Atwood conceded in In Other Worlds (2011) that they simply drew the genre lines differently.

Atwood has described herself as 'a terrible' what?

She writes both by hand and on a computer, and began writing plays and poems at the age of six.

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

A dietitian — Margaret Dorothy Killam, born in Woodville, Nova Scotia, worked as a dietitian and nutritionist before marrying Carl Atwood, with whom she raised three children.

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

An Aunt — Atwood appears in the pilot as one of the Aunts at the Red Center and slaps Offred when she fails to join the chorus of shaming during a 'testifying' session.

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 Dan David Prize with her; both went to Tel Aviv University despite boycott calls, Atwood saying 'we don't do cultural boycotts'.

What was the first name of the company Atwood founded for her remote-signing device?

Unotchit Inc. — pronounced 'you no touch it' — was the company; she set it up to build the device, and it was renamed Syngrafii in 2013 as it shifted toward electronic signatures.

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.