Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 25

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Arundhati Roy's first novel, set in Ayemenem in Kerala and built around the twins Rahel and Estha, won the Booker Prize in 1997, the fiftieth year of Indian independence.

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.

She took a man's name so that her novels would be judged as serious literature rather than as light romances by a woman, and she wrote Middlemarch, Silas Marner, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss under it.

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.

Abdur Razzaq Samarqandi came from Herat in the fifteenth century as the envoy of the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh, and his account, part of the work Matla-us-Sadain, describes the great fortifications of Vijayanagara in seven concentric walls, the crowded bazaars, the jewel market and the court ceremony, and it is…

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.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale is said to have given her the title Bharat Kokila, the Nightingale of India. She was also the first woman to be president of the Indian National Congress, at the Kanpur session of 1925, and the first woman governor of an Indian state, in the United Provinces.

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.

Aurangzeb ended official history writing after the first ten years of his reign, which the Alamgirnama of Mirza Muhammad Kazim had covered, so Khafi Khan wrote his history privately; his very name is understood to mean the one who wrote in secret.

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.

Mudrarakshasa is a political drama whose plot turns on the statecraft of Chanakya as he brings down the Nandas and places Chandragupta Maurya on the throne, and historians use it as a literary source for that change of dynasty.

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.

His account of the office, published as My Presidential Years, is valued because his term fell in a period of short-lived governments, and it records how a President handles the choice of a Prime Minister when no party has a majority.

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…

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…