Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 5

The director of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai wrote this memoir with the journalist Poonam Saxena, and its title plays deliberately on Vikram Seth's novel A Suitable Boy, which is the trap most often set with this question.

Romancing with Life appeared in 2007, timed to the actor's eighty-fourth birthday, and covers his arrival in Bombay, the founding of Navketan Films with his brother Chetan Anand, and the making of films such as Guide and Hare Rama Hare Krishna.

Jhootha Sach is a Hindi novel in two parts, the first on Lahore before the division and the second on the lives of those uprooted by it, and it is among the longest works of fiction on Partition.

The correct answer is C, Ayesha Jalal, whose study argues that the demand for Pakistan worked for a long while as a bargaining position in the politics of the 1940s, and it is the standard academic work on Jinnah's role.

Midnight's Children takes its title from the children born at the midnight of independence, its narrator Saleem Sinai being born at the very hour, and it won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was later voted the best of the Booker winners.

The correct answer is B, Urvashi Butalia, whose book is built out of interviews with survivors and is the standard work on Partition as remembered by ordinary people, especially women and children.

Azadi follows a Hindu family of Sialkot forced to leave for India, and it brought its author the Sahitya Akademi Award in English in 1977.

Toba Tek Singh, in which an inmate refuses either country and dies on the strip of land between the two borders, is the most quoted single piece of Partition writing; Manto's other work on these years includes the story Thanda Gosht and the collection of one-line sketches Siyah Hashiye.

Azad, who was president of the Congress through the Quit India years, gave his account of the negotiations leading to Partition in India Wins Freedom, written in Urdu and rendered into English with the help of Humayun Kabir; a portion of it was withheld from publication for thirty years.

The two journalists, one American and one French, wrote Freedom at Midnight as a narrative account of the last year of British rule, the division of the country and the killing of Gandhi, drawing on interviews with Mountbatten.

Pinjar, in English The Skeleton, tells the story of Puro, a woman abducted at the time of the division, and is the central Punjabi novel of Partition; Amrita Pritam's poem addressed to Waris Shah is the other work of hers always cited on this theme.

Tamas, meaning darkness, is Bhisham Sahni's Hindi novel on the days of killing in a town of western Punjab, and it won him the Sahitya Akademi Award; a well known television serial was made from it.

Train to Pakistan, published in 1956, is set in the imaginary border village of Mano Majra and follows what a trainload of bodies does to a village where Sikhs and Muslims had lived together; it is the best known English novel of Partition.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet and novelist won the prize in 1986, the first African laureate in literature, and he is remembered for plays such as Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests.

The Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Dylan in 2016 for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, the first time a songwriter had been honoured in the literature category, and the choice was widely debated because his words were written to be sung.

Alfred Nobel died on 10 December 1896, and the prizes have been presented on the anniversary of his death ever since the first ceremony in 1901, with the literature, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics medals handed over at Stockholm and the peace prize at Oslo on the same day.

Naipaul was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian origin, settled in Britain and drew on both worlds in A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and the Indian travel books An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father taught at an art school, and his Indian years shaped The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and at forty-one remains the youngest laureate in the category.

The Colombian writer published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, the chronicle of the Buendia family in the imaginary town of Macondo, and he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982; his other celebrated novel is Love in the Time of Cholera.

The French philosopher and novelist declined the prize of 1964, explaining that a writer must not allow himself to be transformed into an institution and that he had always refused official honours.