Literature trivia questions and answers
30 literature trivia questions with the answers and a fact for each: novels and their characters, authors and pen names, poetry, theatre, children's books and the big prizes. Read them as a book quiz for yourself, use them for a pub quiz round, or press the button and play a Literature round live with everyone answering on their own phone.
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The 30 literature quiz questions
- 1Novels
Holden Caulfield is the teenage narrator of which novel?
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AThe Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger carried early chapters in his pack when he landed in Normandy on D-Day in 1944.
- 2
Which author created Paddington Bear?
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AMichael Bond
Bond bought a lonely-looking toy bear at Selfridges on Christmas Eve 1956 and named it after the London railway station near his flat.
- 3Prizes
Which Irish poet won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995?
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DSeamus Heaney
Heaney's translation of Beowulf won the 1999 Whitbread Book of the Year, beating Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
- 4
Who wrote The Great Gatsby?
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BF. Scott Fitzgerald
It sold poorly in 1925; Fitzgerald died in 1940 thinking it a failure, and it only became a classic after free copies went to US troops in WWII.
- 5
Who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia?
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BC. S. Lewis
Lewis and Tolkien were close friends at Oxford, meeting every week in a pub with a writers' group called the Inklings.
- 6
Who wrote the children's book Where the Wild Things Are?
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DMaurice Sendak
Sendak based the wild things on his Brooklyn relatives, who pinched his cheeks as a boy and told him they could eat him up.
- 7Characters
In Life of Pi, what is the name of the tiger sharing Pi's lifeboat?
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CRichard Parker
Richard Parker was also the name of a real cabin boy eaten by shipwrecked sailors in 1884 — and of a character in Poe.
- 8
Who wrote Don Quixote?
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BMiguel de Cervantes
Published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, it's often called the first modern novel. Cervantes and Shakespeare died within days of each other in April 1616.
- 9Authors
Which author created the valet Jeeves and his hapless employer Bertie Wooster?
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BP. G. Wodehouse
Jeeves was named after Percy Jeeves, a Warwickshire cricketer Wodehouse saw play, who was killed at the Somme in 1916.
- 10Novels
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' opens which novel?
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CRebecca
Daphne du Maurier's narrator, the second Mrs de Winter, is never given a first name in the entire book.
- 11Characters
Brooding anti-hero Heathcliff stalks the moors in which novel?
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BWuthering Heights
It was Emily Brontë's only novel; she died in December 1848, a year after it was published, aged just 30.
- 12Authors
Thomas Hardy set Tess and Far from the Madding Crowd in a fictional county called…?
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DWessex
Hardy's heart is buried in Stinsford, Dorset, while his ashes lie in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
- 13
Which author created the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot?
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AAgatha Christie
Poirot appeared in 33 novels; when he died in Curtain in 1975, The New York Times ran an obituary for him on its front page.
- 14
In which Italian city is Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set?
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DVerona
Verona still receives thousands of letters a year addressed to Juliet, answered by a team of volunteers.
- 15
Who wrote the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four?
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BGeorge Orwell
Orwell wrote it on the Scottish island of Jura while seriously ill; one theory is that the title simply swaps the digits of 1948, the year he finished it.
- 16Theatre
Superstitious actors refuse to say the name of which Shakespeare play inside a theatre?
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BMacbeth
They call it 'the Scottish play'; the traditional cure for a slip involves leaving the room, spinning three times and spitting.
- 17Pen names
George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, was the pen name of…?
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AMary Ann Evans
Before her novels appeared, she wrote a withering essay titled 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' — hence the male name.
- 18
Which author created the detective Sherlock Holmes?
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BArthur Conan Doyle
Holmes first appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887. Conan Doyle killed him off in 1893 and was pressured into bringing him back.
- 19Theatre
My Fair Lady was adapted from Pygmalion, a play by which writer?
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AGeorge Bernard Shaw
Shaw won an Oscar for the 1938 film of Pygmalion — and reportedly regarded the award as an insult.
- 20Pen names
Crime writer Robert Galbraith, creator of detective Cormoran Strike, is really…?
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AJ. K. Rowling
The secret leaked in 2013 via a tweet from a lawyer's friend, and sales of The Cuckoo's Calling rocketed overnight.
- 21
Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude?
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DGabriel Garcia Marquez
The Colombian author won the Nobel Prize in 1982. He said he wrote the novel in 18 months, selling the family car to pay the bills.
- 22Novels
The Handmaid's Tale is set in the theocratic Republic of…?
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AGilead
Margaret Atwood wrote it in West Berlin in 1984, on a rule that nothing in it lacked a real historical precedent.
- 23
Who wrote The Cat in the Hat?
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BDr. Seuss
He wrote it using only about 236 different words, after a publisher challenged him to produce a reading primer that children would actually enjoy.
- 24Prizes
Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies both won the Booker Prize for which author?
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DHilary Mantel
Her wins in 2009 and 2012 made Mantel the first woman to take the Booker twice.
- 25Poetry
'I wandered lonely as a cloud' — who wrote the daffodils poem?
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AWilliam Wordsworth
The daffodils grew beside Ullswater; Wordsworth's sister Dorothy recorded the walk in her journal two years before the poem.
- 26
In Peter Pan, what is the name of the pirate captain?
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BCaptain Hook
Hook lost his hand to a crocodile, which then followed him around hoping for the rest — having also swallowed a ticking clock.
- 27
Who wrote The Divine Comedy, a poem journeying through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven?
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BDante
Dante wrote it in Italian rather than Latin, which helped make his Tuscan dialect the basis of modern Italian. His Hell has nine circles.
- 28
In Norse mythology, what is the name of Thor's hammer?
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BMjolnir
Thursday is 'Thor's day'. Wednesday is named after his father Odin, known in Old English as Woden.
- 29Children's
Roald Dahl's giant peach carries which boy across the Atlantic?
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BJames
Dahl considered a giant cherry, but a peach was 'prettier, bigger and squishier'.
- 30
In Greek mythology, who flew too close to the Sun on wings made of feathers and wax?
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BIcarus
The wings were built by his father Daedalus to escape from Crete. Daedalus flew at a sensible height and made it to safety.
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Literature quiz FAQ
Can I use these literature trivia questions for my own quiz night?
That is what the page is for. Read them out at a pub quiz, paste them into a work quiz or a family quiz night, and keep the answers hidden until the table has committed. If you would rather not keep score by hand, the button on this page runs a Literature round on everyone's phones.
Are the answers on the page?
Yes. Every question has a "Show the answer" toggle with the right option and a one-line fact, so you can quiz yourself first or read straight through with the answers open.
How do I play a Literature quiz round live?
Press "Play a Literature round". It opens the host page with the Literature category already picked. The room shows a join code, everyone else opens huddlequiz.com/join on their phone and types it, and ten questions later there is a winner on the board. No accounts and nothing to install.
Will the live game ask the same questions?
Some of them. The game draws at random from a bigger Literature pool, of which this page is a sample, so a live round mixes questions you have read here with ones you have not.
How hard are they?
Mixed. They are written for adults and teenagers at pub-quiz level, so a table of four should get most of them between them and argue about the rest.