50 Fun Facts About Modern Literature

Which French philosopher tried to refuse the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying he declined all official honours?

Jean-Paul Sartre argued that a writer should not let himself be turned into an institution, and the Swedish Academy gave him the prize anyway.

Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature but skipped the ceremony in Stockholm?

Bob Dylan stayed away, so Patti Smith sang his 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall' in his place, stopping to apologise when nerves made her lose a verse.

Which Daphne du Maurier novel opens 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' and never names its narrator?

Rebecca's narrator becomes the second Mrs de Winter, yet it is Maxim's dead first wife, the title character, who dominates the Cornish estate.

Which novel popularised the word cyberspace, coined in its author's short story 'Burning Chrome'?

Neuromancer spread William Gibson's word until cyberspace became the name for the online world, and it swept the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards.

Which 1942 Albert Camus novella has Meursault kill a man on an Algiers beach weeks after his mother's funeral?

The Stranger's prosecutor dwells more on Meursault's failure to cry at his mother's funeral than on the killing itself.

Which novel did Judge John Woolsey clear of obscenity in 1933, ending its de facto US ban?

James Joyce's Ulysses got its day in court only because Random House arranged for US customs to seize an imported copy as a test case.

Whose remark did Ernest Hemingway quote as the 'lost generation' epigraph of The Sun Also Rises?

Gertrude Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner, Hemingway recalled in A Moveable Feast, and turned it on Hemingway himself.

Which 1958 Chinua Achebe novel, about the Igbo leader Okonkwo, takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem?

Things Fall Apart tells colonisation from the Igbo side, and Achebe later branded Conrad's Heart of Darkness racist for dehumanising Africans.

Which Haruki Murakami novel, a realist coming-of-age love story, made him a celebrity in Japan?

Norwegian Wood was Murakami's bid, he said, to prove he could write in a realistic style, and it sold two million copies in Japan.

Which Patricia Highsmith con man, sent to Italy to bring home shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, appears in five novels?

Tom Ripley batters Dickie Greenleaf to death in the first novel, yet Highsmith lets him evade justice in every book.

Which Virginia Woolf novel follows Clarissa through a single day in London as she prepares to host a party?

Mrs Dalloway's working title was The Hours, later the title of a 2002 film about three women across generations shaped by the book.

Which Allen Ginsberg poem had its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, arrested and tried for obscenity?

Howl was first seized by US customs, which released the 520 copies; San Francisco police then arrested Ferlinghetti, and Judge Clayton W. Horn cleared the poem.

Which 1962 novel is narrated by Alex in Nadsat, a teenage slang built largely from Russian?

A Clockwork Orange's American edition dropped the last chapter, in which Alex grows up and renounces violence, and Kubrick's film followed that version.

Which Umberto Eco novel sends Franciscan friar William of Baskerville to probe deaths at a Benedictine abbey?

The Name of the Rose's killings guard Aristotle's lost book on comedy, which the killer will do anything to keep from being read.

Which Milan Kundera novel, set around the 1968 Prague Spring, follows the Prague surgeon Tomáš?

The Unbearable Lightness of Being's Tomáš refuses to retract a letter criticising the regime, quits surgery and becomes a window washer.

Which Günter Grass novel is narrated by Oskar, who stops growing at three and can shatter glass with his shriek?

The Tin Drum's author waited until 2006 to admit that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS at 17.

Which novel, refused by Soviet publishers, was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in Italy?

Doctor Zhivago helped win Pasternak the next year's Nobel Prize, but Soviet authorities denounced him and forced him to decline it.

Which Mikhail Bulgakov novel lets the Devil loose in 1930s Moscow?

The Master and Margarita was given to Mick Jagger by Marianne Faithfull, and it helped inspire him to write 'Sympathy for the Devil'.

Which Soviet author's novella about a day in a Stalinist labour camp was published in 1962?

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, and he spent most of the next two decades in seclusion in Vermont.

Which novel about the German soldier Paul Bäumer was among the books burned in Nazi Germany?

All Quiet on the Western Front was burned as a pacifist book, and in 1943 a Nazi court had Remarque's sister Elfriede beheaded.

Which Thomas Mann novel about Hans Castorp grew out of a 1912 visit to his wife at a Davos tuberculosis sanatorium?

The Magic Mountain began as a humorous companion piece to Death in Venice, meant to be about as short, and grew into a 1924 epic.

Which French novelist wrote the world's longest novel, in which a madeleine dipped in tea stirs a memory?

Marcel Proust's second volume won the Prix Goncourt, and the award brought him international fame.

Which Japanese novelist, author of Confessions of a Mask, died by seppuku in 1970 after a failed coup attempt?

Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s, and in 1968 it went instead to his countryman Yasunari Kawabata.

Which South Korean novelist's The Vegetarian won the 2016 International Booker Prize?

Han Kang had just finished dinner with her son in Seoul when the call came telling her she had won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which Peruvian novelist, author of The Time of the Hero, lost the 1990 presidential election to Alberto Fujimori?

Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for 'his cartography of structures of power', twenty years after the voters turned him down.

Which Nigerian novelist's TEDx talk 'We Should All Be Feminists' was sampled by Beyoncé and printed on a Dior T-shirt?

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's talk became a short book, and in 2015 every 16-year-old high-school student in Sweden was given a copy.

Which 2003 debut by Afghan-born physician Khaled Hosseini follows Amir's guilt over his boyhood friend Hassan in Kabul?

The Kite Runner's sales took off only once the paperback came out, and it went on to spend 101 weeks on the US bestseller list.

Which Brazilian author's The Alchemist sold so poorly at first that its publisher gave up on it?

Paulo Coelho kept knocking on other publishers' doors, and The Alchemist went on to sell tens of millions of copies.

Which Stieg Larsson hacker, likened to a grown-up Pippi Longstocking, debuted in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?

Lisbeth Salander's creator died in 2004, before any of the three Millennium novels had been published.

Which John le Carré spymaster, who cleans his glasses on the fat end of his tie, hunts a mole inside the Circus?

George Smiley's creator, John le Carré, left MI6 to write full-time once The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a best-seller.

Which Hilary Mantel novel about Thomas Cromwell won the 2009 Booker Prize and opened a trilogy?

Wolf Hall takes its title from the Seymour family seat, where Henry VIII may first have courted Jane Seymour, a moment just outside the novel.

Who shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Margaret Atwood for Girl, Woman, Other, becoming the first Black woman to win it?

Bernardine Evaristo shared the prize only because the judges flouted a rule against joint winners, the first tie in almost 30 years.

Which Thomas Pynchon novel did the 1974 Pulitzer jury pick, only for the board to call it 'unreadable' and 'obscene'?

Gravity's Rainbow left 1974 with no Pulitzer for fiction awarded at all, while Pynchon stayed away and let comedian 'Professor' Irwin Corey collect its National Book Award for him.

Which Paul Beatty satire about reviving segregation near Los Angeles made him the first American Booker winner?

The Sellout opens with its narrator before the US Supreme Court, charged with keeping a slave and re-segregating his Los Angeles suburb.

Which Samantha Harvey novel, following six astronauts through 24 hours on a space station, won the 2024 Booker Prize?

Orbital was written while Harvey watched the live camera feed from the International Space Station, following its orbits of Earth online for months.

Which Cormac McCarthy novel, following a father and son across an ash-covered America, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize?

The Road was picked for Oprah Winfrey's book club, and McCarthy, who rarely gave interviews, appeared on her show.

Which Colson Whitehead novel has Cora flee a Georgia plantation on a literal train line, winning the 2017 Pulitzer?

The Underground Railroad was an idea Whitehead shelved for years, feeling unready, until he dropped a satire about digital media to write it.

Which Donna Tartt novel has 13-year-old Theo carry a Dutch painting out of a bombed museum, winning the 2014 Pulitzer?

The Goldfinch is a real 1654 painting by Carel Fabritius, who was killed that year when a gunpowder store near his Delft home exploded.

Which New Orleans comic novel, published thanks to Walker Percy and its late author's mother, won the 1981 Pulitzer?

A Confederacy of Dunces' author, John Kennedy Toole, died by suicide at 31 in 1969, and its title comes from a Jonathan Swift epigram about dunces uniting against a true genius.

Which Barbara Kingsolver novel, set in opioid-hit Appalachia, shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize?

Demon Copperhead fell into place when Kingsolver, stalled on the book for years, sat up late in Charles Dickens's former Broadstairs home.

Which poet read 'The Hill We Climb' at Joe Biden's 2021 inauguration, becoming the youngest inaugural poet?

Amanda Gorman's poem touched on the storming of the US Capitol two weeks before the inauguration.

Which poet of 'Dulce et Decorum est' was killed crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal one week before the 1918 Armistice?

Wilfred Owen's mother received the telegram announcing his death on Armistice Day, as Shrewsbury's church bells rang out in celebration.

Which Irish poet, Nobel laureate of 1995, won the Whitbread Book of the Year with a 1999 verse translation of Beowulf?

Seamus Heaney's last words, texted to his wife minutes before he died in 2013, were 'Noli timere', Latin for 'don't be afraid'.

Which Spanish poet, author of The House of Bernarda Alba, was killed by Nationalists in 1936, his remains never found?

Federico García Lorca's grave was sought in 2009, but the dig at the site where he was believed buried found not a single bone.

Which Hull university librarian's poem 'This Be The Verse' opens by blaming your mum and dad for messing you up?

Philip Larkin was offered the Poet Laureateship in 1984, a year before he died, and turned it down.

Which British dramatist, whose play The Birthday Party closed after eight performances, won the 2005 Nobel Prize?

Harold Pinter's play was rescued by critic Harold Hobson's rave in the Sunday Times, which appeared only after the show had closed.

Which Eugene O'Neill play about the Tyrone family, published only after his death, won the 1957 Pulitzer for Drama?

Long Day's Journey into Night was sealed in a Random House vault with orders to wait 25 years after O'Neill's death, but his widow Carlotta had it published within three.

Which playwright's ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle, including Fences, chronicles Black American life across the 20th century?

August Wilson dropped out of high school after being accused of cheating, then educated himself at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh.

Which towering patient who pretends to be deaf and mute narrates Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest?

Chief Bromden's ward drew on Kesey's time at a California veterans' hospital, where he was a paid volunteer in LSD experiments.

Which novelist won the 2013 Booker Prize at 28 with the 832-page The Luminaries?

Eleanor Catton built The Luminaries on astrology, with twelve sections each shorter than the last to mimic the waning moon.