Authors & Poets

27 questions · Answers revealed below each question · Print this set

1.Which author won the Nobel Prize in 1909 as its first female laureate?
- A. Selma Lagerlöf
- B. Margaret Atwood
- C. D. H. Lawrence
- D. William Faulkner
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Selma Lagerlöf
Did you know? Selma Lagerlöf wrote The Wonderful Adventures of Nils.
2.Which playwright wrote A Streetcar Named Desire?
- A. Henrik Ibsen
- B. Tennessee Williams
- C. Aeschylus
- D. Nelson Rodrigues
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Tennessee Williams
Did you know? Tennessee Williams also wrote The Glass Menagerie.
3.Which poet wrote "Canção do Exílio"?
- A. Walt Whitman
- B. John Keats
- C. Gonçalves Dias
- D. Robert Frost
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Gonçalves Dias
Did you know? Gonçalves Dias's "Canção do Exílio" opens with a longing for the palm trees of Brazil.
4.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995?
- A. Ivo Andrić
- B. Kenzaburo Ōe
- C. Seamus Heaney
- D. Sinclair Lewis
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Seamus Heaney
Did you know? Heaney translated Beowulf into modern English verse.
5.Which author wrote Heart of Darkness?
- A. F. Scott Fitzgerald
- B. Emily Brontë
- C. D. H. Lawrence
- D. Joseph Conrad
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Joseph Conrad
Did you know? Joseph Conrad learned English as a third language after Polish and French.
6.Which playwright wrote The Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage?
- A. Bertolt Brecht
- B. Nelson Rodrigues
- C. Tennessee Williams
- D. Sophocles
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Bertolt Brecht
Did you know? Bertolt Brecht developed the "alienation effect" to keep audiences thinking critically.
7.Which poet wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?
- A. Vinicius de Moraes
- B. Charles Baudelaire
- C. Percy Bysshe Shelley
- D. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Did you know? Samuel Taylor Coleridge said Kubla Khan came to him in an opium dream.
8.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959?
- A. Isaac Bashevis Singer
- B. Kenzaburo Ōe
- C. Salvatore Quasimodo
- D. Samuel Beckett
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Salvatore Quasimodo
Did you know? Quasimodo's hermetic poetry earned Italy's second literature Nobel.
9.Which author wrote The Jungle Book?
- A. Marcel Proust
- B. Rudyard Kipling
- C. Margaret Atwood
- D. Charlotte Brontë
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Rudyard Kipling
Did you know? Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize in 1907, its youngest recipient at the time.
10.Which poet wrote "No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra"?
- A. Olavo Bilac
- B. Castro Alves
- C. William Butler Yeats
- D. Carlos Drummond de Andrade
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Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Did you know? Carlos Drummond de Andrade is regarded among the greatest Brazilian poets of the 20th century.
11.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936?
- A. Luigi Pirandello
- B. Eugene O'Neill
- C. Pablo Neruda
- D. Anatole France
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Eugene O'Neill
Did you know? O'Neill won four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama as well.
12.Which author wrote The God of Small Things?
- A. Arundhati Roy
- B. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- C. Charlotte Brontë
- D. Virginia Woolf
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Arundhati Roy
Did you know? Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize in 1997 with her first novel.
13.Which poet wrote Eugene Onegin in verse?
- A. Alexander Pushkin
- B. Lord Byron
- C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- D. Carlos Drummond de Andrade
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Alexander Pushkin
Did you know? Alexander Pushkin is widely regarded as the founder of modern Russian literature.
14.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1967?
- A. Miguel Ángel Asturias
- B. Pablo Neruda
- C. Alice Munro
- D. Luigi Pirandello
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Miguel Ángel Asturias
Did you know? Asturias drew on Maya mythology in Men of Maize.
15.Which author wrote Lolita?
- A. E. M. Forster
- B. Arundhati Roy
- C. Rudyard Kipling
- D. Vladimir Nabokov
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Vladimir Nabokov
Did you know? Vladimir Nabokov also studied and classified butterflies as an entomologist.
16.Which poet wrote "Ode to a Nightingale" and "Ode on a Grecian Urn"?
- A. Vinicius de Moraes
- B. John Keats
- C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- D. Charles Baudelaire
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John Keats
Did you know? John Keats died of tuberculosis at twenty-five.
17.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999?
- A. Kenzaburo Ōe
- B. Henryk Sienkiewicz
- C. Günter Grass
- D. Yasunari Kawabata
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Günter Grass
Did you know? Grass's Tin Drum follows Oskar who refuses to grow.
18.Which author wrote On the Road?
- A. Chinua Achebe
- B. Jack Kerouac
- C. Victor Hugo
- D. Rudyard Kipling
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Jack Kerouac
Did you know? Jack Kerouac was a leading voice of the Beat Generation.
19.Which poet wrote Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage?
- A. Rainer Maria Rilke
- B. Langston Hughes
- C. Lord Byron
- D. John Keats
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Lord Byron
Did you know? Lord Byron died at Missolonghi while supporting Greek independence.
20.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996?
- A. Henryk Sienkiewicz
- B. Wisława Szymborska
- C. Sigrid Undset
- D. Kenzaburo Ōe
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Wisława Szymborska
Did you know? Szymborska published barely 350 poems across her career.
21.Which author wrote Dead Souls and the story "The Overcoat"?
- A. Jean-Paul Sartre
- B. Hermann Hesse
- C. Orhan Pamuk
- D. Nikolai Gogol
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Nikolai Gogol
Did you know? Nikolai Gogol's "The Overcoat" is famously said to mark the birth of Russian realism.
22.Which writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013?
- A. Anatole France
- B. Alice Munro
- C. Heinrich Böll
- D. Mario Vargas Llosa
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Alice Munro
Did you know? Munro is celebrated as a "master of the contemporary short story".
23.Which author wrote Nausea and declined the 1964 Nobel Prize?
- A. Ray Bradbury
- B. F. Scott Fitzgerald
- C. Jean-Paul Sartre
- D. Jane Austen
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Jean-Paul Sartre
Did you know? Jean-Paul Sartre is the only laureate to decline the Nobel Prize in Literature voluntarily.
24.Which author wrote A Passage to India and Howards End?
- A. Salman Rushdie
- B. E. M. Forster
- C. Alice Walker
- D. George Bernard Shaw
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E. M. Forster
Did you know? E. M. Forster published no novel after A Passage to India (1924).
25.Which author wrote Slaughterhouse-Five?
- A. Boris Pasternak
- B. Hermann Hesse
- C. Kurt Vonnegut
- D. Toni Morrison
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Kurt Vonnegut
Did you know? Kurt Vonnegut based Slaughterhouse-Five on his survival of the Dresden bombing.
26.Which author wrote The Color Purple?
- A. Alice Walker
- B. Jane Austen
- C. Naguib Mahfouz
- D. Émile Zola
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Alice Walker
Did you know? Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983.
27.Which author wrote One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich?
- A. Hermann Hesse
- B. Robert Louis Stevenson
- C. George Bernard Shaw
- D. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Did you know? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize in 1970 after years in the Gulag.

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