Books & Authors Mixed Quiz: Set 27

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.

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.

Kipling was born in Bombay, where his father taught at an art school, and his Indian years shaped The Jungle Book, Kim and the Just So Stories; he received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907 and at forty-one remains the youngest laureate in the category.

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.

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…

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.

Naipaul was born in Trinidad to a family of Indian origin, settled in Britain and drew on both worlds in A House for Mr Biswas, A Bend in the River and the Indian travel books An Area of Darkness and India: A Million Mutinies Now.

Geetanjali Shree's novel Ret Samadhi, translated into English by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize in 2022 and became the first book written in Hindi, and the first from any Indian language, to take that prize.

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…

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.

Alfred Nobel died on 10 December 1896, and the prizes have been presented on the anniversary of his death ever since the first ceremony in 1901, with the literature, physics, chemistry, medicine and economics medals handed over at Stockholm and the peace prize at Oslo on the same day.

Vaidyanath Mishra wrote in Hindi as Nagarjun, a name taken from the Buddhist philosopher, and in Maithili as Yatri, meaning the traveller; he is known for Balchanama and for sharply political poems.

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.

Hsuan Tsang, also written Hiuen Tsang or Xuanzang, reached India in the seventh century and spent years in the empire of Harshavardhana of Kannauj, who received him with honour; he studied at the monastery of Nalanda under Shilabhadra, attended the great religious assemblies at Kannauj and at Prayag, and recorded…

The Swedish Academy awarded the prize to Dylan in 2016 for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition, the first time a songwriter had been honoured in the literature category, and the choice was widely debated because his words were written to be sung.

The award was instituted by the Bharatiya Jnanpith in 1961 and is the senior literary honour given for a body of work in any of the languages recognised by the Constitution.

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.

Amartya Sen was awarded the prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics, among them his work on social choice, on poverty and on the causes of famines.

The Nigerian dramatist, poet and novelist won the prize in 1986, the first African laureate in literature, and he is remembered for plays such as Death and the King's Horseman and A Dance of the Forests.

The Fellowship, not the annual award, is the highest honour the Sahitya Akademi confers, and its rules restrict it to twenty-one living writers at any one time.