Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 26

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.

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.

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.

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories about Indian and Indian-American lives, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, making Lahiri the first writer of Indian origin to win that prize for fiction.

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.

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 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.

As a boy Tagore wrote poems in an archaic Vaishnava style and presented them as the work of a poet named Bhanusimha, and the collection is therefore called Bhanusimha Thakurer Padavali.

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.

Sir Thomas Roe reached India in the second decade of the seventeenth century as the formal ambassador of James the First of England and spent about three years at Jahangir's court, seeking a firm commercial treaty for the East India Company; he obtained trading concessions but not the treaty he…

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.

He deliberately chose the spoken language over Sanskrit so that the story of Rama could reach ordinary listeners, and the poem is still recited and staged across the Hindi belt.

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.

The correct answer is B, Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, who was a scholar of comparative religion; besides having the Upanishads rendered into Persian as the Sirr-i-Akbar, or the greatest secret, he wrote the Majma-ul-Bahrain, the mingling of two oceans, on the common ground between Hindu and…

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.

India Divided was written by Rajendra Prasad, who later became the first President of India, and it examines the demand for partition and the arguments made on either side.

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.

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.

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 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.