Books & Authors Quiz: Nobel Prize in Literature: Laureates and Their Works

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.