Modern Literature Trivia
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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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
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 skipped the ceremony in Stockholm?
Bob Dylan
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.
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 novel popularised the word cyberspace, coined in its author's short story 'Burning Chrome'?
Neuromancer
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.
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 novel did Judge John Woolsey clear of obscenity in 1933, ending its de facto US ban?
Ulysses
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.
Q 07Whose remark did Ernest Hemingway quote as the 'lost generation' epigraph of The Sun Also Rises?
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner, Hemingway recalled in A Moveable Feast, and turned it on Hemingway himself.
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 tells colonisation from the Igbo side, and Achebe later branded Conrad's Heart of Darkness racist for dehumanising Africans.
Q 09Which Haruki Murakami novel, a realist coming-of-age love story, made him a celebrity in Japan?
Norwegian Wood
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.
Q 10Which Patricia Highsmith con man, sent to Italy to bring home shipping heir Dickie Greenleaf, appears in five novels?
Tom Ripley
Tom Ripley batters Dickie Greenleaf to death in the first novel, yet Highsmith lets him evade justice in every book.
Q 11Which Virginia Woolf novel follows Clarissa through a single 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 first seized by US customs, which released the 520 copies; San Francisco police then arrested Ferlinghetti, and Judge Clayton W. Horn cleared the poem.
Q 13Which 1962 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 began as a humorous companion piece to Death in Venice, meant to be about as short, and grew into a 1924 epic.
Q 22Which French novelist wrote the world's longest novel, in which a madeleine dipped in tea stirs a memory?
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust's second volume won the Prix Goncourt, and the award brought him international fame.
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's American edition dropped the last chapter, in which Alex grows up and renounces violence, and Kubrick's film followed that version.
Q 14Which Umberto Eco novel sends Franciscan friar William of Baskerville to probe deaths at a Benedictine abbey?
The Name of the Rose
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.
Q 15Which Milan Kundera novel, set around the 1968 Prague Spring, follows the Prague surgeon Tomáš?
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
The Unbearable Lightness of Being's Tomáš refuses to retract a letter criticising the regime, quits surgery and becomes a window washer.
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 novel, refused by Soviet publishers, was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in Italy?
Doctor Zhivago
Doctor Zhivago helped win Pasternak the next year's Nobel Prize, but Soviet authorities denounced him and forced him to decline it.
Q 18Which Mikhail Bulgakov novel lets the Devil loose in 1930s Moscow?
The Master and Margarita
The Master and Margarita was given to Mick Jagger by Marianne Faithfull, and it helped inspire him to write 'Sympathy for the Devil'.
Q 19Which Soviet author's novella about a day in a Stalinist labour camp was published in 1962?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, and he spent most of the next two decades in seclusion in Vermont.
Q 20Which 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 was burned as a pacifist book, and in 1943 a Nazi court had Remarque's sister Elfriede beheaded.
Yukio Mishima was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the 1960s, and in 1968 it went instead to his countryman Yasunari Kawabata.
Q 24Which South Korean novelist's The Vegetarian won the 2016 International Booker Prize?
Han Kang
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.
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 talk became a short book, and in 2015 every 16-year-old high-school student in Sweden was given a copy.
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's sales took off only once the paperback came out, and it went on to spend 101 weeks on the US bestseller list.
Q 28Which Brazilian author's The Alchemist sold so poorly at first that its publisher gave up on it?
Paulo Coelho
Paulo Coelho kept knocking on other publishers' doors, and The Alchemist went on to sell tens of millions of copies.
Q 29Which Stieg Larsson hacker, likened to 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's creator, John le Carré, left MI6 to write full-time once The Spy Who Came in from the Cold became a best-seller.