What day job did the Booker winner have while writing his novel? Who was rejected by Mills & Boon before becoming a bestselling author? Test your wits with questions from Bernardine Evaristo, Jonathan Coe, David Nicholls and more
WERE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? Lee Child announced his retirement this year. But the Jack Reacher books will continue to be written by his:
daughter
sister
brother
son
Until recently 2020 Booker winner Douglas Stuart’s day job was as a senior New York executive for which clothing brand?
North Face
J Crew
Nike
Banana Republic
A statue dedicated to which feminist writer attracted criticism for its depiction of a female nude?
Simone de Beauvoir
Gloria Steinem
Germaine Greer
Mary Wollstonecraft
Which author’s 1981 bestseller apparently “predicted” the pandemic with its plot device of a Wuhan-virus?
Colleen McCullough
Dean Koontz
Stephen King
Michael Crichton
In Maggie O’Farrell’s Women’s prize winning novel Hamnet, by which name is Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway called?
Agnes
Alice
Angela
Amelia
The Nobel prize winning poet Louise Glück was the co-founder and original investor in which business?
a driving school
a cookery school
a dog training school
a creative writing school
2020 marked 50 years since the publication of Len Deighton’s novel Bomber. Was it the first:
ebook
audiobook
novel written on a word processor
interactive novel
Bestselling thriller writer Clive Cussler died this year. What successful non-profit enterprise did he launch that echoed one of his best-known plots?
an anti-piracy force
flood defence engineering
marine communications
shipwreck salvage
Which award-winning poet is married to the author of the novel behind the Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman TV series The Undoing?
Sharon Olds
Simon Armitage
Paul Muldoon
Alice Oswald
The 16-year-old Dara McAnulty won which literary prize this year?
the Blue Peter prize for best children’s story
the Forward prize for a debut poetry collection
the Wainwright prize for nature writing
the Encore prize for the best second novel
Philip Pullman’s 2004 short story “Serpentine”, featuring Lyra Belacqua and published for the first time this year, was originally written for:
a charity auction
a screenplay
his grandchildren
an opera libretto
As well as concluding her Cromwell trilogy with The Mirror & the Light, Hilary Mantel also published a collection of essays this year. Was it called:
Written on the Bodies
The Queen’s Gambit
Mantel Pieces
Horrid Henry
IAN RANKIN ASKS: Craig Brown’s Baillie Gifford prize-winning study of the Beatles, One Two Three Four, includes the story of a police officer who turned to music after retrieving a guitar from Eddie Cochran’s crashed car. Was the policeman:
Marty Wilde
Dave Dee
Freddie Garrity
Dave Davies
Margaret Atwood published a poetry collection this year. Is its title:
Nearly
Dearly
Early
Pearly
Jonathan Coe’s Mr Wilder and Me is set during the filming of which Billy Wilder movie?
Avanti!
The Front Page
Fedora
Buddy Buddy
BERNARDINE EVARISTO ASKS: The North Peckham estate in south London has inspired a recent collection of poetry that explores its people and environment. Name the poet and the book.
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus
Poor by Caleb Femi
Life on Mars by Tracy K Smith
Which peripatetic American writer of the Harlem Renaissance travelled to Russia in the 1930s at the invitation of the Co-operating Committee for the Production of a Soviet Film on Negro Life to work on a film starring African American actors?
Richard Wright
Langston Hughes
James Baldwin
Claude McKay
Name the author of the 2020 book Bringing Up Race: How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World.
Donald Trump
Boris Johnson
Nigel Farage
Uju Asika
JONATHAN COE ASKS: Which writer, towards the end of his life, expressed regret that Homer had written the Iliad and the Odyssey, rather than “a true history of his own times in humble prose”?
Daniel Defoe
Jonathan Swift
Samuel Johnson
Henry Fielding
In “The Adventure of the Stockbroker’s Clerk”, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson take a train from London to Birmingham. How long does the journey take?
1 hour and 10 minutes
1 hour and 40 minutes
2 hours and 40 minutes
3 hours and 10 minutes
In 1972 BS Johnson and Margaret Drabble edited a multi-authored novel called London Consequences. Which of these writers did not contribute a chapter?
Olivia Manning
Piers Paul Read
Anthony Burgess
Melvyn Bragg
VAL MCDERMID ASKS: What links Bernardine Evaristo, Denise Mina and Gillian Flynn?
They all dropped out of a postgraduate qualification
They have all stood as candidates in local elections
They have all published books with “girl” in the title
They have all performed standup comedy
Many of us have been escaping the four walls of our work space with the breathtaking graphics of open-world video games. But this escapism can become addiction. Iain Banks once smashed the game disk of one such addiction to force himself to write his next book. Which game was his drug of choice?
Railroad Tycoon
Civilization IV
Warcraft
Lemmings 2
Who might come next and why? Mervyn Peake, Ali Smith, Madeleine L’Engle …
Martin Amis – they’ve all written books that play with time; Time’s Arrow is the ultimate such game, for time runs backwards.
Beryl Bainbridge, who was famously shortlisted six times for the Booker without winning. The others have all been short-listed multiple times for the same award without winning – the Shirley Jackson award, the Booker and the Nebula award respectively.
Anthony Trollope. Peake wrote the Gormenghast trilogy, Smith the Seasons Quartet, L’Engle the Time Quintet and Trollope the Barchester Chronicles in six volumes.
JK Rowling. They were all banned by local education authorities in the US during Trump’s presidency.
DAVID NICHOLLS ASKS: Which Whitbread award-winning novelist performed on radio alongside Judith Chalmers and Billie Whitelaw and also appeared in Coronation Street as Ken Barlow’s student friend?
Rose Tremain
Susan Hill
Iris Murdoch
Beryl Bainbridge
As well as playing his own lookalike in the 1977 best picture at the Oscars, which American author’s film appearance won him a Golden Globe nomination for best acting debut?
Truman Capote
John Updike
Norman Mailer
Gore Vidal
Which great novelist plays the English Insurance Company Man in Truffaut’s Day for Night?
JG Ballard
Graham Greene
Anthony Burgess
William Golding
CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS ASKS: Ify Adenuga, the mother of JME, Skepta and Julie Adenuga, this year had a memoir published, titled Endless ...
Fortune
Luck
Love
Year
Brit Bennett, author of the critically acclaimed novel The Vanishing Half, also wrote:
The Fathers
The Mothers
The Twins
The Brothers
Round Table Books, the UK’s first inclusive children’s bookshop, is open for business in which area of south London?
Lewisham
Brixton
New Cross
Balham
PLAGUES IN LITERATURE: How old was Daniel Defoe during the London plague that he depicted in A Journal of a Plague Year?
five
25
50
75
Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague is widely thought to be an allegory of:
the wartime Vichy government in France
De Gaulle’s Free French in London
the French occupation of Algeria
the German occupation of France
Boccaccio’s set of stories The Decameron was written following a 14th-century plague in Florence. Is it made up of:
10 characters telling 10 stories each
10 characters telling one story each
one character telling 10 stories
one character telling 100 stories
Is Emily St John Mandel’s eerily prescient novel Station Eleven set in the aftermath of a:
Spanish flu pandemic
swine flu pandemic
bird flu pandemic
Hong Kong flu pandemic
Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, in which the human race is threatened by a pandemic, takes place in the:
1790s
1890s
1990s
2090s
GREAT ADAPTATIONS: Which book adaptation is this from?
The Goldfinch
Us
His Dark Materials
Motherless Brooklyn
Which book adaptation is this from?
Normal People
The Undoing
Artemis Fowl
Patrick Melrose
Which book adaptation is this from?
Tolkien
The Secret Garden
The Luminaries
Little Fires Everywhere
Which book adaptation is this from?
Dracula
Little Women
The Call of the Wild
Emma
Which book adaptation is this from?
Emma
The Personal History of David Copperfield
The Luminaries
Artemis Fowl
WORDS OF THE YEAR: What does twindemic mean?
an outbreak of double births
an alliance of democracies
a spike in both seasonal flu and Covid
mass bingeing of the Bros documentary
What does zoombombing mean?
dropping explosives from a fast jet
hacking into a video meeting
forcing someone to attend a video meeting at the last minute
tricking someone into clicking a link to an Aretha Franklin song
What does Blursday mean?
national holiday when everyone sings “Parklife”
day devoted to bokeh in photography
any day this year
any hungover day
What does anthropause mean?
temporarily stopping a Netflix documentary about primates
a decrease in testosterone production
when an ethnologist stops talking
a breather for the natural world
What does minimony mean?
a small marriage service
payments on a compact car
trivial complaints
a tiny rock
JUDGING BOOKS BY THEIR COVERS: which 2020 book is this?
The Mirror & The Light by Hilary Mantel
Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Which 2020 book is this?
The Dominant Animal by Kathryn Scanlan
The Lost Words: A Spell Book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris
The Private Joys of Nnenna Maloney by Okechukwu Nzelu
Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald
Which 2020 book is this?
Boy Parts by Eliza Clark
Pine by Francine Toon
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Midnight Sun by Stephenie Meyer
Which 2020 book is this?
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Which 2020 book is this?
Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture by Sudhir Hazareesingh
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste
African Europeans: An Untold History by Olivette Otele
The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery by Michael Taylor
THEY SAID WHAT? Who said: “My dreams stain my day, though it’s not all bad. Once I dreamed I had won a tennis tournament, beating Navratilova.”
Jeanette Winterson
Bernardine Evaristo
Hilary Mantel
Kamila Shamsie
Which sporting manager/coach was mocked for writing of their most successful side: “I remember every single player in that exceptional team.”
Jill Ellis
José Mourinho
Eddie Jones
Arsène Wenger
Who said that the publisher Mills & Boon told them: “We are sorry but neither your characters nor your story are at the high standards demanded by our readers.”
Helen Fielding
Jenny Colgan
Jilly Cooper
Alan Davies
Whose memoir said: “Johnny Rotten was certainly well named when it came to his singing! It came as no surprise to me when punk didn’t last long.”
Mariah Carey
John Cooper Clarke
Brett Anderson
Cliff Richard
Which then middle-aged writer wrote to his mother in a letter published this year: “Froggy is well, though he misses being ‘put to bed’ at night. You spoil him a bit!”
Philip Larkin
TS Eliot
John Berryman
Kenneth Grahame
18 and above.
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Well done!
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Meaning of life!
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Well done!
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You are insanely well-read and we are not worthy.
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