Awards Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
90 free Awards trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Every field has a prize it pretends not to care about. Film, music, theatre, literature, science, cooking, video games and sport all hand out statuettes, medals and cheques once a year, and the stories behind them are better than most acceptance speeches: trophies modelled on odd objects, judges who broke their own rules, winners who refused to turn up and medals that were hidden from the Nazis. These 90 questions move across the whole awards calendar rather than lingering on one ceremony. You will meet the people the prizes are named after, the companies that bankroll them, the age limits and eligibility quirks, the first winners and the record-holders, and a few awards nobody wants to win. It suits a pub quiz round, a watch-party warm-up on ceremony night, or anyone who likes knowing why a trophy looks the way it does. Each answer comes with a short explanation and a source.
30 of 90 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why did the Michelin brothers hand their first guide to hotels and garages free to French motorists?
To sell more tyres
To sell more tyres: the free guide coaxed motorists into longer trips that wore out their rubber. Michelin began charging after André Michelin found copies propping up a workbench at a tyre shop.
Q 02Olympic gold medals must carry at least six grams of gold; the rest of the medal is mostly which metal?
Silver
An Olympic 'gold' is at least 92.5% silver under a thin plating of gold; the last solid-gold medals were handed out in 1912.
Q 03Which actress won a Razzie for All About Steve the night before taking the Best Actress Oscar?
Sandra Bullock
Sandra Bullock turned up to collect her Worst Actress Razzie in person, wheeling in a wagon of All About Steve DVDs for the audience, then won Best Actress for The Blind Side the next night.
Q 04Which Canadian singer won the 1988 Eurovision Song Contest for Switzerland by a single point?
Céline Dion
Céline Dion trailed the United Kingdom going into the final jury, but Yugoslavia gave Switzerland six points and Britain none, so 'Ne partez pas sans moi' won by one.
Q 05How did chemist George de Hevesy hide two Nobel medals from the Nazis in occupied Copenhagen?
Dissolved them in acid
He dissolved them in acid, aqua regia, and left the jar on a lab shelf; after the war the gold was precipitated out and the medals of Max von Laue and James Franck were recast from it.
Q 06France's Prix Goncourt, its most coveted literary prize, comes with a cheque for how much money?
10 euros
The Goncourt cheque is a symbolic 10 euros; the real reward is the sales surge, and the jury still picks the winner over lunch at the Drouant restaurant in Paris.
Q 07The Fields Medal, awarded only to mathematicians under 40, carries the portrait of which ancient Greek thinker?
Archimedes
Archimedes is on the medal, which only under-40s can win; the rule cost Andrew Wiles one, since he completed his proof of Fermat's Last Theorem at 41 and was handed a special plaque instead.
Q 08The Golden Lion is the top prize at the world's oldest film festival, founded in 1932 in which city?
Venice
Venice's festival handed its best films a 'Mussolini Cup' from 1934 to 1942; the Golden Lion of St Mark, named for the winged lion that is the city's symbol, arrived in 1949.
Q 09Which novelist shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo after judges broke the no-split rule?
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood's The Testaments shared the prize with Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, defying a ban on ties brought in after the 1992 split between Michael Ondaatje and Barry Unsworth.
Q 10Broadway's top theatre prize is nicknamed after which co-founder of the American Theatre Wing?
Antoinette Perry
Antoinette Perry, known as Tony, helped found and lead the American Theatre Wing; at the first ceremony in 1947 there was no statuette, so winners took home a scroll and a keepsake such as a compact or money clip.
Q 11The Hugo Awards, science fiction's top prizes since 1953, hand winners a trophy shaped like what?
A rocket ship
A rocket ship has topped every Hugo trophy but one; the first, in 1953, copied the hood ornament of an American car, and the awards take their name from Amazing Stories founder Hugo Gernsback.
Q 12Which American children's book award, named after an 18th-century London publisher, was the world's first?
Newbery Medal
The Newbery Medal, proposed in 1921, honours John Newbery, the London publisher who first made children's books a profitable trade; it is given by a division of the American Library Association.
Q 13Which physicist is the only individual to hold both an Ig Nobel, for levitating a frog, and a real Nobel Prize?
Q 21John F. Kennedy's Presidential Medal of Freedom replaced a 1945 Medal of Freedom created by which president?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman's 1945 Medal of Freedom honoured civilian service in wartime; Kennedy's 1963 executive order turned it into the joint-highest civilian award, alongside the Congressional Gold Medal.
Q 22What did Time magazine crown 'Machine of the Year' for 1982, in place of its usual Man of the Year?
The personal computer
The personal computer took the 1982 cover to herald the dawn of the Information Age, an honour that began with aviator Charles Lindbergh in 1927 and in 2006 went to 'You'.
Q 23Which 1955 film about a lonely Bronx butcher first won both the Palme d'Or and the Best Picture Oscar?
Andre Geim
Andre Geim won the 2000 Ig Nobel for floating a frog in a magnetic field, then shared the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for graphene, which he and Konstantin Novoselov first peeled from graphite with sticky tape.
Q 14London theatre's Olivier Awards hand winners a bust of Laurence Olivier as which Shakespearean warrior king?
Henry V
The statuette shows Olivier as Henry V in his 1937 Old Vic production; the awards began in 1976 as the Society of West End Theatre Awards and took his name in 1984.
Q 15The BAFTA trophy, designed by sculptor Mitzi Cunliffe, takes the form of what?
A theatrical mask
A theatrical mask: Cunliffe made it for the Guild of Television Producers, so it began as a television trophy; the guild's 1958 merger with the British Film Academy created the body now called BAFTA.
Q 16Which act won the Mercury Prize, for British or Irish album of the year, in both 2001 and 2011?
PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey was on tour in Washington, D.C., when her first win was announced on 11 September 2001, the day of the attacks; as of 2025 nobody else had taken the prize twice.
Q 17Which fashion designer made the first of the Brit Awards' annual guest-designed statuettes in 2011?
Vivienne Westwood
Vivienne Westwood's statuette was part of a 2011 reboot of the Brits, which also moved the show from Earls Court to London's O2 arena.
Q 18Sweden's Polar Music Prize, first given to Paul McCartney in 1992, was founded by the manager of which band?
ABBA
ABBA's manager Stig Anderson endowed the prize in 1989 with a donation to the Royal Swedish Academy of Music; the first laureates were Paul McCartney and the three Baltic states.
Q 19The MTV Video Music Awards trophy, a spacesuited astronaut, has officially been called what since 2017?
Moon Person
MTV renamed the 'moonman' the Moon Person in 2017; the figure comes from the channel's 1981 launch ident, which reused Apollo 11 footage.
Q 20For decades until a 2025 redesign, Kennedy Center Honors recipients wore what around their necks at the Washington gala?
A rainbow ribbon
A rainbow ribbon hung round each honoree's neck from the first Honors in 1978 until 2025, when a Tiffany redesign swapped it for a navy-blue strap holding a gold disc.
Marty
Marty, expanded from a 1953 television play, took the first Palme d'Or ever awarded; The Lost Weekend had earlier paired Cannes's old top prize, the Grand Prix, with Best Picture.
Q 24Which company has funded the Turing Award's $1 million prize, the 'Nobel of computing', since 2014?
Google bankrolls the $1 million prize alone, a fourfold rise from the $250,000 it had co-funded with Intel until 2013; the Association for Computing Machinery has given the award since 1966.
Q 25Whose keynote at the first Laureus World Sports Awards declared 'sport has the power to change the world'?
Nelson Mandela
Nelson Mandela, the first patron of Laureus, gave the keynote in Monte Carlo on 25 May 2000, and the organisation adopted his speech as the philosophy behind its Sport for Good charity work.
Q 26The Masters champion may take the green jacket home for one year; where must it stay after that?
At Augusta National
It must stay at Augusta National, where champions wear it only on the grounds; Gary Player took his home to South Africa after his 1961 win and had to promise never to wear it in public.
Q 27FIFA's Puskás Award, created in 2009 and first won by Cristiano Ronaldo, honours what each year?
The most beautiful goal
The Puskás Award goes to the most beautiful goal of the year, and stars do not always win: in 2015 Wendell Lira of the small Brazilian club Goianésia beat Lionel Messi in the vote.
Q 28Which striker, later president of Liberia, became the first non-European to win the Ballon d'Or in 1995?
George Weah
George Weah won in 1995, the year eligibility opened to players of any origin at European clubs, and through 2025 he remained the only African winner; he was Liberia's president from 2018 to 2024.
Q 29The World Cup's best-goalkeeper prize was the Yashin Award until 2006, honouring a keeper from which country?
Soviet Union
Lev Yashin of the Soviet Union, the 'Black Spider' who played in dark kit and seemed to have eight arms, lent his name to the prize from 1994 to 2006; it is now the Golden Glove.
Q 30Who created and hosts The Game Awards, launched in 2014 to succeed the Spike Video Game Awards?
Geoff Keighley
Geoff Keighley, a games journalist, put about $1 million of his own money into launching the show after years of working on the Spike awards.