The literature round rewards breadth over depth to an almost comic degree.
Nobody is asked to interpret anything. They are asked who wrote what, who
created which character, what the first line is, and what the pen name was —
and a person who has read fifty novels carefully will lose to a person who
knows the covers of five hundred.
The four question shapes
Author of. The bulk of the round. Concentrate on the canon that
British quizzes actually use: Dickens, Austen, the Brontës, Hardy, Orwell,
Shakespeare, Agatha Christie, and the twentieth-century American set.
Who created. Detectives and recurring characters especially — Poirot,
Marple, Holmes, Wimsey, Maigret, Rebus, Morse. Setters like these because the
character is more famous than the author.
Opening lines. A small, fixed set: Pride and Prejudice,
1984, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby-Dick, Anna
Karenina, The Go-Between, Rebecca. Learn the seven and you
have the round's showpiece question.
Pen names and real names. George Eliot, George Orwell, Mark Twain,
Lewis Carroll, the Brontës' Bell brothers, Richard Bachman. Reliable, and
reliably worth two points because they are often asked in both directions.
Shakespeare, and the prizes
Shakespeare is a round of his own in disguise: the count of plays and
sonnets, which play contains which line, who dies in what, and
how many words he is supposed to
have coined — a figure that is usually quoted far too high, which is itself
sometimes the question. The authorship question comes up too, generally as
a trap for people who have read
about it once.
Prizes are the other seam: the Booker, the Nobel in Literature, the Pulitzer.
Recent winners date a quiz; the notable refusals and controversies do not.
Poetry sits alongside all this, and is asked mostly through laureates and first
lines. See also
the madman who helped write the OED and
the words that got into
dictionaries by mistake.
Which Orwell novel gives us Room 101, Newspeak and Big Brother?
Answer Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)
Which Shakespeare play features Ophelia?
Answer Hamlet
First winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature to be a songwriter?
Answer Bob Dylan (2016)
Who wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Answer Oscar Wilde
Who wrote "The Old Man and the Sea" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls"?
Answer Ernest Hemingway
Who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
Answer Roald Dahl
Who wrote Great Expectations?
Answer Charles Dickens
Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?
Answer Jane Austen
'Call me Ishmael' opens which novel?
Answer Moby-Dick (Melville)
Which Shakespeare play features Brutus and Cassius?
Answer Julius Caesar
Who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm?
Answer George Orwell (Eric Blair)
Which Shakespeare play features Lady Macbeth?
Answer Macbeth
Who wrote "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Of Mice and Men"?
Answer John Steinbeck
Who wrote "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"?
Answer Edgar Allan Poe
Who wrote 'If—'?
Answer Rudyard Kipling (voted UK's favourite poem)
Which Shakespeare play features Prospero, Miranda and Caliban?
Answer The Tempest
Which Tolstoy heroine throws herself under a train?
Answer Anna Karenina
Which reclusive Amherst poet left nearly 1,800 poems, fewer than a dozen published in her lifetime?
Answer Emily Dickinson
'Now is the winter of our discontent' — which play?
Answer Richard III
Who wrote Jane Eyre?
Answer Charlotte Brontë
Which Joseph Heller novel gave English a phrase for a no-win rule?
Answer Catch-22
Which Shakespeare play features Mercutio and Tybalt?
Answer Romeo and Juliet
Which Shakespeare play features Iago?
Answer Othello
Who wrote Moby-Dick?
Answer Herman Melville
Which poet spent his life expanding a single collection, "Leaves of Grass"?
Answer Walt Whitman
Who wrote Frankenstein?
Answer Mary Shelley
Which poet is credited with the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey"?
Answer Homer
Who wrote "Treasure Island" and "Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"?
Answer Robert Louis Stevenson
Who wrote 'Ode to a Nightingale', dying at 25 in Rome?
Answer John Keats
Which American poet wrote "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"?
Answer Robert Frost