Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 14

Shashi Tharoor, the writer and parliamentarian, wrote Ambedkar: A Life, a short life of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar; his other recent books include Pride, Prejudice and Punditry, and his earlier works are An Era of Darkness and Why I Am a Hindu.

Heart Lamp gathers short stories written in Kannada by Banu Mushtaq, and it won the International Booker Prize in 2025; it was the first collection of short stories to take that prize.

Her Hindi novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book originally written in any Indian language to do so; the prize money is shared equally by the author and the translator.

Raghuram Rajan, who was Governor of the Reserve Bank of India from 2013 to 2016, wrote Breaking the Mould with the economist Rohit Lamba, arguing that India should build on services and skills rather than copy the manufacturing path of East Asia.

Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's External Affairs Minister and earlier the Foreign Secretary, wrote Why Bharat Matters, in which he explains India's place in a changing world order; his earlier book, published in 2020, is The India Way: Strategies for an Uncertain World.

The book tells the story of the Christian Medical College at Vellore, one of India's oldest teaching hospitals, and it was written by Dr. V I Mathan, a physician long associated with that institution.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian essayist and novelist who writes on politics, history and ideas, and The World After Gaza is his book on how the conflict in West Asia is read differently in the West and in the formerly colonised world.

The correct answer is B, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer whose novel traces seven generations of the Buendia family in the imagined town of Macondo and became the best known work of magical realism; he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

His novel follows Pelageya Nilovna, the mother of a young factory worker, as she is drawn from fear and obedience into the revolutionary movement of her son; it was translated into many Indian languages and shaped progressive writing here.

The correct answer is B, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Florentine diplomat whose short book advises a ruler on how power is actually gained and kept rather than how it ought to be used; his name gave English the adjective machiavellian.

The correct answer is B, Homer, the Greek poet to whom both epics are traditionally credited: the Iliad on the anger of Achilles during the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey on the ten year voyage of Odysseus back to Ithaca.

The correct answer is A, Jane Austen, whose novel of the Bennet sisters, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy opens with one of the best known first lines in English; she also wrote Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion.

The novel follows a poor student in St Petersburg who kills a pawnbroker, convinces himself that extraordinary men stand above the law, and is then broken by his own conscience; Dostoevsky also wrote The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.

The correct answer is A, Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet of Florence whose long poem carries the narrator through hell, purgatory and paradise in three parts, and which helped make the Tuscan dialect into modern Italian.

Animal Farm is a short allegory in which farm animals overthrow their owner and the pigs take his place, and Nineteen Eighty-Four gave the language the words Big Brother, thought police and doublethink.

The short novel tells of an ageing Cuban fisherman who hooks a giant marlin far out at sea and fights to bring it home; Hemingway also wrote A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The correct answer is C, Victor Hugo, the French novelist, poet and dramatist whose Les Miserables follows the convict Jean Valjean through the France of the early nineteenth century, and whose The Hunchback of Notre-Dame made the cathedral of Paris a character in its own right.

The correct answer is A, Miguel de Cervantes, the Spanish writer whose tale of an elderly gentleman who reads too many books of chivalry, takes up a lance and rides out with his squire Sancho Panza is regarded as the first modern novel in Europe.

The Russian novelist set War and Peace against the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, following several families through war and peace alike, and he also wrote Anna Karenina, the other title always paired with his name.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract (1762) that the English people are free only during the election of members of Parliament, and are slaves once the election is over.