Books & Authors GK Questions with Answers – Page 7

His Adhyatma Ramayanam, written in the kilippattu or parrot-song form in which a bird narrates the story, settled the vocabulary, script and metre of literary Malayalam and put the Ramayana within reach of ordinary readers, which is why he carries this title.

The vachanas are short, direct compositions in the rhythmic Kannada of ordinary speech, carrying devotion to Shiva together with a sharp attack on caste and empty ritual, and they belong to the Veerashaiva or Lingayat movement of the twelfth century, of which Basavanna was the central figure; the woman saint…

He was awarded the Jnanpith in 1970 for Ramayana Kalpavrukshamu, a retelling of the Ramayana in Telugu verse, and he was the first Telugu writer to receive the prize.

Nannaya, Tikkana and Errana are called the Kavitrayam, the trinity of poets, because between them they rendered the Mahabharata into Telugu over the course of several centuries; Nannaya, the Adikavi of Telugu, began the work and also wrote the grammar Andhra Shabda Chintamani, while Errana continued and Tikkana completed it.

Kuvempu, whose full name was K. V. Puttappa, was awarded the Jnanpith in 1967 for this long poem, a retelling of the Ramayana in modern Kannada, and he was the first Kannada writer to receive the prize; he also wrote the state song of Karnataka.

Pampa wrote in the tenth century and is called the Adikavi of Kannada on the strength of two works, Vikramarjuna Vijaya, also known as Pampa Bharata, which retells the Mahabharata with his patron in the place of Arjuna, and Adipurana, on the life of the first Jain Tirthankara.

The first Jnanpith Award was conferred for the year 1965 on the Malayalam poet G. Sankara Kurup for his collection Odakkuzhal, which means the reed flute; the prize itself had been instituted in 1961 by the Bharatiya Jnanpith.

The seven voyages of Sindbad belong to the Arabian Nights, a collection of tales in Arabic that grew over many centuries from Persian, Indian and Arab sources and has no single author; the same is true of Aladdin and Ali Baba.

A British naval intelligence officer during the Second World War, Fleming turned his experience into fiction and introduced James Bond, the agent with the code number 007, in Casino Royale in 1953, following it with eleven more novels and two collections of stories.

Victor Frankenstein is a student of natural philosophy who assembles a being from dead matter and gives it life, then abandons it in horror; the being itself is never named in the novel and is called the creature, the being or the daemon.

Published from 1888, Chandrakanta tells of the princess Chandrakanta and prince Virendra Singh and of the ayyars, the shape-shifting spies who serve them, moving through a tilism, an enchanted maze of traps and illusions.

He invented the small south Indian town of Malgudi and set almost all his fiction there, beginning with Swami and Friends in 1935, whose schoolboy hero gave the collection Malgudi Days its world.

He created Chacha Chaudhary, the small turbaned old man whose brain is said to work faster than a computer, and his giant companion Sabu from the planet Jupiter, and the strip became one of the most widely read Indian comics in Hindi and in many other languages.

Born in Bombay, Kipling created the boy Mowgli, raised by wolves in the Seoni forests of central India, along with the tiger Shere Khan, the bear Baloo, the panther Bagheera and the python Kaa, in The Jungle Book of 1894.

Published in 1936, Godan is the best known novel of Munshi Premchand, the pen name of Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, and it follows the peasant Hori and his wife Dhania as their small ambition of owning a cow is destroyed by debt, caste and the demands of the landlord.

The film-maker was also a prolific writer for young readers in Bengali, and he created Pradosh Chandra Mitra, called Feluda, who solves cases with his cousin Topshe and the thriller writer Lalmohan Ganguly, nicknamed Jatayu.

The Scottish physician and writer introduced Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1887 and went on to write four novels and more than fifty short stories about him, narrated by Dr John Watson, with the address 221B Baker Street in London.

Oliver Twist, published in instalments from 1837, is his second novel and follows an orphan boy from a workhouse into a gang of young thieves in London, giving English the figures of Fagin, the Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes.

My Story is her frank autobiography, first serialised and then published as a book, and she wrote English poetry as Kamala Das while publishing Malayalam fiction and prose under the pen name Madhavikutty.

Hajar Churashir Maa, written in Bengali in 1974, follows a mother who learns that her son, killed as a Naxalite, is only a corpse number in a police register, and it was later filmed in Hindi as Hazaar Chaurasi Ki Maa.