Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 6

The Swedish writer won the prize in 1909, eight years after the prize was first given, and she was later also the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy itself.

Alfred Nobel's will of 1895 named a different body for each prize, and for literature it named the Academy in Stockholm, founded in 1786 to guard the Swedish language, which still announces the laureate each October.

The Golden Boat is the English title of Sonar Tari, the Bengali collection of poems Tagore published in 1894, nineteen years before his Nobel Prize, and its title poem is among the best known in modern Bengali verse.

The Swedish Academy cited the profoundly sensitive and beautiful verse of Gitanjali, which Tagore had himself rendered into English as Song Offerings and published in 1912 with an introduction by W. B. Yeats; the prize made him the first Asian and the first non-European laureate in any Nobel category.

A nineteenth century scholar and reformer, he compiled Hemkosh, which was the first Assamese dictionary to be arranged on etymological lines and which fixed much of the modern spelling of the language; the work was published after his death.

Manvini Bhavai is his novel of rural Gujarat during a devastating famine, written from the inside of peasant life, and it is the work for which he received the Jnanpith Award.

A leading writer of the Jonaki era that began with the magazine of that name in 1889, he wrote humour, satire, plays and the much loved collection of folk tales Burhi Aair Sadhu, meaning Grandmother Tales, and he composed O Mur Apunar Desh, which is now the state song of…

The fifteenth and sixteenth century Vaishnava saint founded the Ekasarana faith and shaped much of Assamese cultural life: he composed the devotional songs known as Borgeet, wrote the one-act plays called Ankiya Nat that are staged as Bhaona, gave rise to the dance tradition now called Sattriya, and wrote the…

Writing in the fourteenth century, he put the Ramayana into Assamese verse in seven books, which is what the name Saptakanda records, and the work is counted among the first translations of the epic into any modern Indian language.

He is called the father of Odia fiction and of modern Odia prose and is titled Utkala Byasa Kabi, and his novel Chha Mana Atha Guntha is a sharp, ironic account of how a scheming landlord dispossesses a poor weaver couple of their small plot of land.

The fifteenth century poet composed the Odia Mahabharata, along with the Chandi Purana and the Vilanka Ramayana, and in writing the epic in the speech of ordinary people rather than in Sanskrit he earned the title Adikavi, the first poet of Odia.

Her poem Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu calls on the old poet of Heer to speak again over the suffering of Partition, her novel Pinjar tells the story of an abducted woman of those years, and she received the Jnanpith Award in 1981 for the collection Kagaz Te Canvas.

His Heer, composed in 1766, is the version of the tragic love story of Heer and Ranjha that is still sung and quoted across Punjab, and it is the answer whenever an examiner names the qissa.

He published Saraswatichandra in four parts between 1887 and 1901, and the long social novel about a learned young man and the world around him is treated as the work with which the modern Gujarati novel begins.

Narsinh Mehta was a fifteenth century devotional poet of Gujarat who is honoured as the Adi Kavi, the first poet of the language, and his bhajan Vaishnav Jan To lists the qualities of a true devotee, which is why Gandhi made it part of the daily prayer at his ashram.

Samskara is his best known novel, set in a Brahmin village thrown into crisis by the question of who may perform the last rites of a man who had broken every rule of the community, and it is read as a central text of modern Kannada fiction; its author received…

Allasani Peddana was the foremost of the eight poets of the court of Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, a group known as the Ashtadiggajas, and he wrote Manucharitra, which earned him the title Andhra Kavita Pitamaha, the grandfather of Telugu poetry; the reign is remembered as the golden age of Telugu, and…

Kanyasulkam, meaning bride price, was written against the custom of selling young girls in marriage to much older men, and it broke new ground by using spoken Telugu rather than the literary dialect, which is why it is counted as the first modern play in the language.

Chemmeen, whose title means prawn, is set among the fishing people of the Kerala coast and turns on the belief that the sea will not spare a fisherman whose wife has been unfaithful; it is the best known Malayalam novel outside the language.

Indulekha, published in the late nineteenth century, is treated as the first major Malayalam novel and tells the story of an educated young woman of a Nair household who refuses an arranged match, which made it a social argument as much as a story.