State Exams GK Questions 2026

Eric Arthur Blair chose the pen name George Orwell, taking the surname from the river Orwell in England, and under it wrote Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days and the essay Shooting an Elephant.

Sampooran Singh Kalra took the pen name Gulzar, meaning a garden in bloom, and is known both for Urdu poetry and for film lyrics, and for the collection Raat Pashmine Ki.

Netaji is a title of respect given to Subhas Chandra Bose by his followers, and he did not publish his writing under it.

The takhallus is the pen name a poet adopts, such as Ghalib, Mir, Faiz or Firaq, and by convention the poet mentions it in the closing couplet of a ghazal.

He was a leading figure of the Nayi Kavita movement, edited the Tar Saptak anthologies that introduced a generation of poets, and wrote the novels Shekhar Ek Jivani and Nadi ke Dweep.

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.

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.

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.

Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan first wrote under the takhallus Asad and later chose Ghalib, which means dominant or victorious, and he names himself in the closing couplet of many ghazals.

He took the name from the call of a Mississippi riverboat crew, where mark twain meant a sounding of two fathoms, that is water deep enough to be safe.

He is always written as Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, the pen name meaning the unique or the unlike-any-other, and he wrote Saroj Smriti, Ram ki Shakti Puja and the poem Bhikshuk.

He wrote first in Urdu as Nawab Rai, and after the colonial administration seized his collection Soz-e-Watan he adopted the name Premchand, under which he wrote Godan, Nirmala, Gaban, Rangbhoomi and the story Kafan.

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

The Turing Award has been given by that body since 1966, is named after the British mathematician Alan Turing, and is widely described as the Nobel Prize of computing; Raj Reddy, of Indian origin, received it in 1994 for work in artificial intelligence.

The Gandhi Peace Prize was instituted by the Government of India in 1995, the one hundred and twenty-fifth birth anniversary year of Mahatma Gandhi, and although foreign nationals and institutions may receive it, it is an Indian national award given by the Government of India.

The Right Livelihood Award was instituted in 1980 in Sweden to honour work on the practical problems the Nobel Prizes were seen to overlook, and it is presented in Stockholm; the Chipko Movement received it in 1987 and Ela Bhatt of the Self Employed Women's Association in 1984.

The World Food Prize was created in 1986 at the initiative of Norman Borlaug to honour work that improves the quality, quantity or availability of food, and the Indian agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan, a leader of the Green Revolution in India, received the very first prize in 1987.

The award was instituted in 1957 by the trustees of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund in memory of Ramon Magsaysay, President of the Philippines, who died in an air crash that year, and it is presented at Manila to persons of Asia for greatness of spirit in service to the people.

The Fields Medal was instituted in 1936 and is awarded every four years at the International Congress of Mathematicians, with the condition that the recipient be under forty on the first of January of that year, the purpose being to encourage further achievement rather than to crown a career.

The Abel Prize was established in 2002, the bicentenary of the birth of the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, first awarded in 2003 to Jean-Pierre Serre, and it carries no age limit, so it recognises a lifetime of work.