Margaret Atwood Trivia
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97 free Margaret Atwood trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 97 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Canadian city was Margaret Atwood born in 1939?
Ottawa
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.
Q 02What was Margaret Atwood's father's profession?
Entomologist
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.
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 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.
Q 06What was Margaret Atwood's first novel, published in 1969?
The Edible Woman
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.
Q 07Margaret Atwood's 1972 book Survival is a thematic guide to what?
Canadian literature
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.
Q 08In The Handmaid's Tale, who scratched 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum' inside Offred's wardrobe?
Her predecessor
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.
Q 09In The Handmaid's Tale, what is the name of Offred's husband, lost in their failed escape to Canada?
Luke
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.
Q 10In The Handmaid's Tale, where are 'Unwomen' sent to clear toxic waste until they die?
The Colonies
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.
Q 11In Gilead, what colour do the Handmaids wear?
Red
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.
Q 12What is the name of the Commander's wife in The Handmaid's Tale?
Serena Joy
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 13Which 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 21In Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy, the plague that wipes out most of humanity is hidden inside what product?
A libido pill
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.
Q 22Who directed the 2017 miniseries of Margaret Atwood's Grace Marks novel, adapted by Sarah Polley?
Mary Harron
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.
Q 23For which novel did Margaret Atwood win her first Booker Prize, in 2000?
The Blind Assassin
Q 14What is the name of the underground resistance network in The Handmaid's Tale?
Mayday
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.
Q 15The epilogue of The Handmaid's Tale is a transcript of what kind of event, held in 2195?
An academic conference
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.
Q 16In which city did Margaret Atwood begin writing The Handmaid's Tale in spring 1984?
West Berlin, Germany
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.
Q 17To which suspected ancestor, who survived a witchcraft hanging, did Atwood partly dedicate The Handmaid's Tale?
Mary Webster
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.
Q 18How 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 19Which German director made the 1990 film of The Handmaid's Tale, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter?
Volker Schlöndorff
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.
Q 20On which streaming service did Bruce Miller's The Handmaid's Tale series begin airing in 2017?
Hulu
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.
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.
Q 24Which 2003 novel opened Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy?
Oryx and Crake
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.
Q 25Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad retells which epic from Penelope's point of view?
The Odyssey
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.
Q 26Margaret Atwood's 2016 novel Hag-Seed is a modern retelling of which Shakespeare play?
The Tempest
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.
Q 27In The Testaments, the teenager Daisy learns she is really which child, smuggled out of Gilead as an infant?
Baby Nicole
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.
Q 28With 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 29What remote robotic signing device did Margaret Atwood invent so she could skip book tours?
The LongPen
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.
Q 30Margaret Atwood's unread manuscript Scribbler Moon is sealed until 2114 in a library in which country?
Norway
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.