Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 24

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.

The Golden Threshold, published in 1905, was her first collection of poems in English, and it was followed by The Bird of Time in 1912 and The Broken Wing in 1917.

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.

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan first wrote under the takhallus Asad and later chose Ghalib, which means dominant or victorious, and he names himself in the closing couplet of many ghazals.

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.

Al-Biruni wrote this work in Arabic in the eleventh century as a careful account of Indian religion, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, law, custom and measurement, setting out each belief as its own followers held it and comparing it with Greek and Islamic learning; he had learned Sanskrit for the purpose, and…

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.

It became a marching song of the freedom movement and is played by the armed forces at ceremonial parades.

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.

Two different books carry the title Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, and the difference between them is the commonest trap in this topic: Barani’s runs from the reign of Balban down to the early years of Firoz Shah Tughlaq, while the other, by Shams-i-Siraj Afif, is devoted to the reign of Firoz Shah…

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.

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.

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.

Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar retold the story of King Yayati from the Mahabharata as a novel about desire and its cost, and for it he became the first writer in Marathi to receive the Jnanpith Award.

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.

Akbar set up a translation department in which Sanskrit works were rendered into Persian, and the Mahabharata was translated there as the Razmnama, a name that means the book of war.

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.

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.

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.

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…