1.Saving Mr Banks is a 2013 film that depicts the relationship between an Australian author and a Hollywood movie legend and the making of one of Hollywood’s beloved musical
film about an English nanny. Name the author and the movie legend.
2.Uncle Pai was the name by which Anant Pai was best known. What will children always remembered him for?
3.Which English writer used the swastika as his emblem in all his books?
4.Which collection of children’s stories (magical or fantasy stories of how various phenomena came to be) was given its
name because the author’s daughter always wanted them told to her in a certain way without any modifications? The collection includes such famous stories as The Elephant’s Child (or How the Elephant Got its Trunk) and How the Leopard Got its Spots.
5.Who signed a poem as C.33?
6.William Shakespeare wrote 38 plays. Which comedy happens to be the shortest of his plays and which tragedy is
the longest Shakespearean play?
7.For which work of poems was Rabindranath Tagore given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913? The Nobel committee described it thus in its citation: “because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West”.
8.Which character represents Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland and why?
9.Driven into hiding by Khomeini’s infamous fatwa, a lonely Salman Rushdie wrote an anti-censorship allegory set in a fantastic quasi-Arabian-Nights world in danger of being destroyed by the evil ‘cult-master’ Khattam-Shud, the enemy of all speech itself. Name this story.
10.Rushdie dedicated Haroun and the Sea of Stories to his son with this poem: Zembla, Zenda, Xanadu; / All our dream-worlds may come true. / Fairy lands are fearsome too. / As I wander far from view / Read, and bring me home to you. What was his son’s name that is cleverly concealed in this dedication?
11.Funeral Blues is a famous poem featured in a eulogy delivered at the funeral in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The collection of poems it appeared in became a bestseller after its appearance in the film. Name the poet who wrote this.
12.J R R Tolkein was born in 1892 and died in 1973. So why did his fans celebrate the date of his birth in January 2003 as a special event?
13.He was born in 1802, half black and half white. He was inspired by a production of Hamlet to become an author and playwright. He was derisively called “fiction factory” by his peers since he was so full of ideas that he could not put them down on paper on his own and hired others to do so. He wrote hundreds of novels but only four-five are classics. But he died penniless. Who was this flamboyant Frenchman?
14.Which American novelist is credited with originating the phrase ‘The Jazz Age’?
15.What term describes the novels of Tom Clancy, which are filled with technical descriptions of weaponry?
16.Which Agatha Christie novel was inspired by the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s child — an incident that outraged America.
17.The term used to describe the narrator of events in classical Sanskrit drama is derived from a word meaning ‘one who controls the strings’ referring to a puppet master who can control the actions of his puppets. What word is this?
18. In Kalidasa’s play Shakuntala was forsaken by her husband King Dushyanta but is reunited with him in the end when he recognises her by a ring that he had presented her. How is this aspect of the story reflected in the title of the play?
19.Joe Klein was revealed to be the author of which 1996 American bestseller?
20.Which of R K Narayan’s novels is said to be his most autobiographical?
answers
1.PL Travers and Walt Disney. The movie was Mary Poppins.
2.The creator of the Amar Chitra Katha comic books
3.Rudyard Kipling. He later removed it when it became associated with the Nazis.
4.Just So Stories by Rudyard
Kipling
5.Oscar Wilde, prisoner of Cell 3, third landing, signed his poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol thus.
6.A Comedy of Errors and Hamlet
7.Gitanjali
8.The Dodo. Lewis Carroll had a stammer and stuttered when asked his name – Dodgson – ‘Do-Do-Dodgson’. When his biography appeared in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was inserted just before the entry on the dodo!
9.Haroun and the Sea of Stories
10.Zafar. The first letters of each line make up the name.
11.W H Auden. The collection of poems was titled Tell Me the Truth about Love.
12.It was Tolkein’s 111th birthday. Bilbo Baggins held a party for his own ‘eleventy first’ birthday in the opening pages of The Lord of the Rings.
13.Alexander Dumas Pere (the father of the equally famous Alexander Dumas Fils!)
14.F Scott Fitzgerald.
15.Techno-thriller
16.Murder on the Orient Express
17.Sutradhar
18.The full title of the play is ‘Abhijnana Shakuntala’ (or Shakuntala Recognised by a Token).
19.Primary Colours by Anonymous.
20.The English Teacher.