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50 free Modern Literature trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Modern literature is where the novel stopped behaving. Writers composed whole novels without one vowel, burned their own manuscripts, smuggled books across borders, turned down the Nobel and wrote in slang nobody had spoken before. The stories behind the books are often as good as the books. These fifty questions range across the 20th and 21st centuries and across the world: the modernists of Paris, Dublin and London, the Russians who published abroad, the Latin American boom, Japan, Korea, Nigeria and Egypt, the Beat poets and the war poets, the playwrights of menace and memory, and the winners of the big prizes from the 1910s to the 2020s. Each answer carries the detail that makes it stick. It suits a book-club night, an English classroom, a pub quiz literature round or anyone who wants to find out how much of the modern canon they really know.
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Q 01Which French philosopher tried to refuse the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature, saying he declined all official honours?
Jean-Paul Sartre
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.
Q 02Which singer-songwriter won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature but did not travel to Stockholm for the ceremony?
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan's citation praised 'new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition', and he collected his medal at a private ceremony in April 2017.
Q 03Which Daphne du Maurier novel opens 'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again' and never names its narrator?
Rebecca
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.
Q 04Which 1984 William Gibson novel popularised the word cyberspace, coined in his short story 'Burning Chrome'?
Neuromancer
Neuromancer remains the only novel to win the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award, science fiction's triple crown.
Q 05Which 1942 Albert Camus novella has Meursault kill a man on an Algiers beach weeks after his mother's funeral?
The Stranger
The Stranger's prosecutor dwells more on Meursault's failure to cry at his mother's funeral than on the killing itself.
Q 06Which 1922 James Joyce novel did Judge John Woolsey rule 'not obscene' in 1933, ending its de facto US ban?
Ulysses
Ulysses got its day in court only because Random House imported a French-printed copy and arranged for US customs to seize it.
Q 07Who coined the phrase 'Lost Generation', which Ernest Hemingway used as an epigraph for The Sun Also Rises?
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein picked the phrase up from a French garage owner scolding a young mechanic, Hemingway recalled in A Moveable Feast.
Q 08Which 1958 Chinua Achebe novel, about the Igbo leader Okonkwo, takes its title from a W. B. Yeats poem?
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart has been translated into more than fifty languages, making it one of the most translated works of literature in the world.
Q 09Which Haruki Murakami novel, named after a Beatles song, made him a reluctant superstar in Japan?
Norwegian Wood
Norwegian Wood's success drove Murakami to leave Japan for a time, and it opens with Toru Watanabe hearing the song as his plane lands in Hamburg.
Q 10Which Patricia Highsmith con man, sent to Italy to bring home shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, appears in five novels?
Tom Ripley
Tom Ripley's five novels, published between 1955 and 1991, are known to fans as the Ripliad.
Q 11Which Virginia Woolf novel follows Clarissa through one June day in London as she prepares to host a party?
Mrs Dalloway
Mrs Dalloway's working title was The Hours, later the title of a 2002 film about three women across generations shaped by the book.
Q 12Which Allen Ginsberg poem had its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights, arrested and tried for obscenity?
Howl
Howl was cleared on 3 October 1957, when Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene.
Q 13Which 1962 Anthony Burgess novel is narrated by Alex in Nadsat, a teenage slang built largely from Russian?
A Clockwork Orange
Q 21Which Thomas Mann novel about Hans Castorp grew out of a 1912 visit to his wife at a Davos tuberculosis sanatorium?
The Magic Mountain
The Magic Mountain was published in November 1924, twelve years after Mann's own three-week stay among the Davos doctors and patients.
Q 22Which French novelist's seven-volume cycle, the world's longest novel, turns on the taste of a madeleine dipped in tea?
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust's first volume, Swann's Way, was rejected by several publishers, and the last three volumes appeared only after his death.
Q 23Which Japanese novelist, author of Confessions of a Mask, died by seppuku in 1970 after a failed coup attempt?
Yukio Mishima
A Clockwork Orange lost its 21st chapter, in which Alex simply grows out of violence, in every US edition before 1986.
Q 14Which Umberto Eco novel sends Franciscan friar William of Baskerville to probe deaths at an Italian abbey in 1327?
The Name of the Rose
The Name of the Rose's killer laces the pages of a forbidden book with poison, knowing a reader will lick his fingers to turn them.
Q 15Which Milan Kundera novel, set around the 1968 Prague Spring, follows the surgeon Tomáš and the café waitress Tereza?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being follows two women, two men and a dog through the 1968 Prague Spring, and it was filmed in 1988.
Q 16Which Günter Grass novel is narrated by Oskar, who stops growing at three and can shatter glass with his shriek?
The Tin Drum
The Tin Drum's author waited until 2006 to admit that he had been drafted into the Waffen-SS at 17.
Q 17Which Boris Pasternak novel, refused by Soviet publishers, was smuggled to Milan and first published in Italy in 1957?
Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago brought Pasternak the Nobel Prize the following year, an award that embarrassed and enraged the Soviet Communist Party.
Q 18Which Mikhail Bulgakov novel, with the Devil loose in 1930s Moscow as Professor Woland, was first published in 1966–67?
The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita was burned by Bulgakov in 1930, just as the Master burns his own book in the story, and then written again.
Q 19Which Soviet author's novella about a day in a Stalinist labour camp appeared in 1962 with Nikita Khrushchev's approval?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was stripped of Soviet citizenship and flown to West Germany in 1974, and settled in Vermont two years later.
Q 20Which Erich Maria Remarque novel about the German soldier Paul Bäumer was among the books burned in Nazi Germany?
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front cost Remarque his German citizenship in 1938, and in 1943 the Nazis beheaded his sister Elfriede.
Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s, including in 1968, when it went to his benefactor Yasunari Kawabata.
Q 24Which South Korean novelist's The Vegetarian was the first Korean-language novel to win the International Booker Prize?
Han Kang
Han Kang became the first Asian woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2024, for 'intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas'.
Q 25Which Peruvian novelist, author of The Time of the Hero, lost the 1990 presidential election to Alberto Fujimori?
Mario Vargas Llosa
Mario Vargas Llosa won the 2010 Nobel Prize for 'his cartography of structures of power', twenty years after the voters turned him down.
Q 26Which Nigerian novelist's TEDx talk 'We Should All Be Feminists' was sampled by Beyoncé and printed on a Dior T-shirt?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus has been translated into more than forty languages, and she spent four years writing Half of a Yellow Sun.
Q 27Which 2003 debut by Afghan-born physician Khaled Hosseini follows Amir's guilt over his boyhood friend Hassan in Kabul?
The Kite Runner
The Kite Runner spent 101 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, letting Hosseini retire from medicine to write full-time.
Q 28Which Brazilian author's The Alchemist had a first print run of 900 copies, and a publisher who chose not to reprint it?
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho's fable about a shepherd boy has since sold more than 150 million copies in over 65 languages.
Q 29Which Stieg Larsson hacker, imagined as a grown-up Pippi Longstocking, debuted in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
Lisbeth Salander
Lisbeth Salander's creator died in 2004, before any of the three Millennium novels had been published.
Q 30Which John le Carré spymaster, who cleans his glasses on the fat end of his tie, hunts a mole inside the Circus?
George Smiley
George Smiley is short, overweight and balding, compared by le Carré to a toad, the opposite of the glamorous spy of his era.