Who was the first Indian woman to win the Booker Prize?
- A.Anita Desai
- B.Kiran Desai
- C.Arundhati Roy
- D.Jhumpa Lahiri
Correct answer
Explanation
The correct answer is C, Arundhati Roy. She won the Booker Prize in 1997 for her first novel, The God of Small Things, set in Kerala, and no Indian woman had won it before her. She wrote her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, twenty years later.
Option A, Anita Desai, reached the Booker shortlist three times but never won the prize, which is exactly why she is placed here. Option B, Kiran Desai, is Anita Desai's daughter and did win, but in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss, nine years after Roy. Option D, Jhumpa Lahiri, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2000, an American award, and not the Booker. The sequence of Indian-origin Booker winners is Naipaul 1971, Rushdie 1981, Roy 1997, Kiran Desai 2006 and Adiga 2008.
Read the full article: Ramon Magsaysay, Pulitzer and Booker: Indian Winners
Practice Questions
View allThe Ramon Magsaysay Award is named after a former President of which country?
- A.Indonesia
- B.Malaysia
- C.Philippines
- D.Thailand
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Ramon Magsaysay was President of the Philippines and died in an aircraft crash in March 1957. The award was created in his memory later that year, and it is given at Manila, the Philippine capital, on 31 August, his birth anniversary.
Read the full explanation →In which year was the Ramon Magsaysay Award established?
- A.1947
- B.1952
- C.1957
- D.1962
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The trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund of New York set up the award in 1957, the year in which President Ramon Magsaysay died, and the first awards were given in 1958.
Read the full explanation →Who was the first Indian to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award?
- A.Mother Teresa
- B.Vinoba Bhave
- C.Jayaprakash Narayan
- D.C. D. Deshmukh
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He received the award in 1958, in the very first year it was given, for community leadership, in recognition of the Bhoodan movement in which he walked from village to village asking landowners to give land to the landless.
Read the full explanation →The Ramon Magsaysay Award is popularly described as
- A.Asia's Nobel Prize
- B.Asia's Booker Prize
- C.the Nobel Prize of the Pacific
- D.Asia's Pulitzer Prize
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The description is used because the award honours a lifetime of selfless service in Asia, in fields such as government service, public service and community leadership, in the manner in which the Nobel Prizes honour service to humanity.
Read the full explanation →The Pulitzer Prize is administered by which institution?
- A.Harvard University
- B.Columbia University
- C.Yale University
- D.the Library of Congress
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Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper publisher who owned the New York World, left money in his will both for a school of journalism and for the prizes, and Columbia University in New York administers the awards on the advice of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
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