Jorge Luis Borges
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50 free Jorge Luis Borges trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel, called long books a laborious madness, and still rebuilt world fiction from a few dozen short stories about libraries, mirrors, dreamers and forking time. Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, schooled in Geneva, blind by his mid-fifties, he spent years as a municipal library assistant writing in the basement before Ficciones and El Aleph made him the bridge between modernism and everything that came after. These 50 questions walk through the life and the stories. The easy tier covers his country, his blindness, the Aleph and Funes; the middle asks about Ultraism, the journal Sur, Bioy Casares, the Harvard lectures and the Paraguayan wedding to María Kodama; the hard tier reaches for Red Scharlach, Fray Bentos, the peryton, Prisma pasted on city walls, Artur Lundkvist's Nobel objection and the 1946 English translation of The Circular Ruins. There are questions on politics too: the poultry-inspector insult under Perón, the essay Yo, Judío, and the Falklands comb. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Borges's 1949 collection The Aleph is named after the first letter of which alphabet?
Hebrew
Hebrew: aleph is its first letter, thought to have begun as a drawing of an ox's head, and the Greeks borrowed the same sign as their alpha.
Q 02Which 1944 Borges collection includes "The Library of Babel", "The Circular Ruins" and "Death and the Compass"?
Ficciones
Ficciones grew out of a slimmer book that Argentina's National Prize jury passed over, a snub that led the magazine Sur to devote part of an issue to a 'Reparation for Borges'.
Q 03Borges shared the first International Formentor Prize in 1961 with which writer?
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett shared the prize, which brought Borges, until then little translated into English, to international attention.
Q 04Which condition overtook Borges in his fifties?
Blindness
Blindness crept up on him as it had on his father; he never learned Braille, and from then on he composed in his head and dictated.
Q 05In 1955 Borges was appointed director of which Argentine institution?
National Library
The National Library made a director of a man whose first library job, in 1938, had been as an assistant in a quiet municipal branch.
Q 06Borges died in 1986 in which city, where he had gone to school?
Geneva
Geneva sheltered his family during the First World War; he called the city one of his homelands and, gravely ill, moved back there for his last months.
Q 07In Borges's "The Library of Babel", the universe is an endless library of rooms of what shape?
Hexagonal
Hexagonal rooms repeat without end, four walls of each lined with shelves, and every book runs to exactly 410 pages, so the library holds every book that could ever be written.
Q 08Which Borges story features a point in space that contains all other points?
The Aleph
The Aleph sits in the cellar of Carlos Argentino Daneri, a mediocre poet who uses it to write an epic describing every place on the planet.
Q 09A Borges story curses the young Ireneo Funes with the inability to do what?
Forget
Forget is the one thing Funes cannot do: he retains every detail he has ever perceived, a gift so crushing that he can no longer think in general ideas.
Q 10Which 1941 Borges story is said to foreshadow the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?
The Garden of Forking Paths
The Garden of Forking Paths turns on a novel that is really a labyrinth of time, in which every choice branches into its own future, as worlds do in the later theory.
Q 11Borges wrote parody detective stories as "H. Bustos Domecq" with which collaborator?
Adolfo Bioy Casares
Adolfo Bioy Casares supplied half the pen name: by Borges's account, Bustos was one of his own great-grandfathers and Domecq one of Bioy's.
Q 12Which honour was Borges nominated for year after year without ever winning?
Nobel Prize in Literature
The Nobel Prize in Literature eluded him for decades; he joked that not granting it to him had become a Scandinavian tradition.
Q 13As a child, Borges translated which Oscar Wilde story into Spanish?
The Happy Prince
Q 21What was the title of Borges's first poetry collection, published in 1923?
Fervor de Buenos Aires
Fervor de Buenos Aires was his first book; he later regretted some of his early publications so much that he tried to buy up every copy and destroy them.
Q 22Borges's sister Norah made her name in which art?
Painting
Painting made Norah Borges's name; she also cut the print for the cover of her brother's first book of poems.
Q 23Borges delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1967-68 at which university?
Harvard
Harvard gave its Norton chair of poetry, for nine months, to a man best known for prose; his six talks there became the book This Craft of Verse.
The Happy Prince appeared in a Buenos Aires newspaper under the name he shared with his father, so friends assumed the father had done the translating.
Q 14Borges dismissed which literary form as one that requires padding?
The novel
The novel: he never wrote one, saying that laziness was the first reason and that novels wearied him, while he could read a good short story over and over.
Q 15In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Uqbar is first sought in what kind of reference work?
An encyclopedia
An encyclopedia: the article on Uqbar exists in only one copy of a pirated reprint of the Britannica, the first clue that someone is inventing a world.
Q 16In "Death and the Compass", who is detective Erik Lönnrot's criminal nemesis?
Red Scharlach
Red Scharlach lays the clues himself: knowing Lönnrot will read a pattern into the murders, he lets the detective reason his way to the place where he is to die.
Q 17In "The Circular Ruins", a stranger arrives at a burned temple intending to do what?
Dream a man into being
Dream a man into being is his whole purpose, and he succeeds; only at the end does he understand that he too is a figure in someone else's dream.
Q 18What does the heroine of Borges's "Emma Zunz" set out to do?
Avenge her father
Avenge her father is the plan: she shoots the mill owner she blames for his ruin, then tells the police a rehearsed story in which he attacked her.
Q 19Borges recorded the 1965 album El Tango with which Argentine composer?
Astor Piazzolla
Astor Piazzolla wrote the music and Borges the verses, which the tango singer Edmundo Rivero recorded with them in the studio.
Q 20Under which president was Borges "promoted" to inspector of poultry and rabbits?
Juan Perón
Juan Perón's officials told him it was because he had sided with the Allies in the war; Borges took the hint and resigned the next day.
Q 24From 1967 Borges spent five years working with Norman Thomas di Giovanni on what?
His English editions
His English editions: Borges was so pleased with their joint translations that he gave di Giovanni an equal share of the royalties.
Q 25Who became Borges's widow and the heir to his estate?
María Kodama
María Kodama worked with him on Old English texts, studied Icelandic with him and travelled the world at his side; as his heir she ran his estate until her death in 2023.
Q 26Borges's 1986 marriage was conducted by proxy in which South American country?
Paraguay
Paraguay was the usual way round for Argentines blocked by their own divorce laws, so the wedding took place there by proxy, seven weeks before he died.
Q 27In Spain, the young Borges joined which avant-garde literary movement?
Ultraism
Ultraism was a young Spanish movement when Borges joined it; he carried it home to Buenos Aires in 1921, then gradually abandoned the style.
Q 28How was Prisma, the broadsheet Borges co-founded, mostly distributed?
On walls
On walls: Borges and his fellow poets printed each issue as one large sheet and pasted it up themselves around Buenos Aires, but Prisma lasted only two issues.
Q 29Which William Faulkner novel did Borges translate into Spanish in 1940?
The Wild Palms
The Wild Palms was barely a year old when Borges translated it; the choice of a lesser Faulkner novel probably came down to opportunity and the need for money.
Q 30Borges grew up bilingual thanks to his paternal grandmother, who came from which country?
England
England: Frances Haslam of Staffordshire married an Argentine colonel, and the English spoken in her family's home made her grandson bilingual from childhood.