Roald Dahl Trivia
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92 free Roald Dahl trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Roald Dahl trivia quiz covers the whole of a very strange life, not just the books on the classroom shelf. The easy questions cover the titles every child knows, the country he was born in, the language he spoke at home, the explorer he was named after and the illustrator who drew his worlds. From there it moves through the biography: the dead mouse in the gobstopper jar, the Cadbury test boxes at Repton, the Shell job in Tanganyika, the Gladiator crash in the Libyan desert, the dogfights over Athens and the intelligence work in wartime Washington alongside Ian Fleming. The harder end covers the Hitchcock episodes, the three Edgar Awards, the Bond screenplay, the valve he helped invent for children with hydrocephalus, the honour he turned down, the words in the Oxford Roald Dahl Dictionary, what he was buried with, and the £500 million Netflix deal. Fans of Matilda, The BFG and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory will find plenty on how those books came to be. Every answer was checked against Dahl's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our children's books and Willy Wonka quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 92 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country was Roald Dahl born?
Wales
Wales: his father, a successful shipbroker, had settled in Cardiff, so Dahl was born in the city's Llandaff district.
Q 02Dahl's parents were immigrants from which country?
Norway
Norway: after his father died, his mother chose not to take the children home, because Harald had wanted them educated in British schools.
Q 03Dahl was named after which famous polar explorer?
Amundsen
Amundsen vanished in 1928 while flying over the Arctic to search for the crew of a crashed airship.
Q 04Which children's author, his childhood idol, did Dahl meet when he was six?
Beatrix Potter
Beatrix Potter used her book profits to buy Lake District farms, and she left almost all her property to the National Trust.
Q 05In the 'Great Mouse Plot of 1924', eight-year-old Dahl and his friends put a dead mouse in a jar of what?
Gobstoppers
Gobstoppers: the headmaster caned all five boys for the prank, and a blue plaque went up at Mrs Pratchett's old sweet shop.
Q 06Which Matilda character did Dahl base on Mrs Pratchett, a 'mean and loathsome' woman from his boyhood?
Miss Trunchbull
Miss Trunchbull even suffers a similar prank in the book, when Lavender slips a newt into her water jug.
Q 07What is the title of Dahl's autobiography about his childhood?
Boy
Boy tells how, when Dahl was three, his seven-year-old sister Astri died, and his father died only weeks later.
Q 08Which Dahl book did Wes Anderson turn into a 2009 stop-motion film starring George Clooney?
Fantastic Mr Fox
Fantastic Mr Fox: Anderson recorded the voice cast on location, in a forest, an attic and a stable, rather than in a studio.
Q 09Which chocolate company sent new bars to Dahl's school for testing, inspiring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?
Cadbury
Dahl dreamed of inventing a bar that would win the praise of Mr Cadbury himself.
Q 10After school, Dahl joined which oil company and was posted to East Africa?
Shell
Shell posted him to Tanganyika, where his gardener once killed a charging black mamba with a rake.
Q 11Which obsolete biplane fighter was Dahl flying when he crashed in the Libyan desert in 1940?
Gloster Gladiator
Gloster Gladiator: he had been sent to the wrong location, and crash-landed in no man's land after running low on fuel at dusk.
Q 12In which Egyptian city did Dahl spend months in hospital after his 1940 desert crash?
Alexandria
Alexandria: he was blind for six weeks, and after months of recovery there he went back to flying fighters.
Q 13In Dahl's The Twits, what does Mr Twit coat a tree with to catch birds for pie?
Glue
Glue: the monkeys and birds later glue the Twits' furniture to the ceiling, tricking them into thinking they're upside down.
Q 21What was Dahl's first children's book, published in 1943?
The Gremlins
The Gremlins caught Walt Disney's eye, though his planned film was never made, and Eleanor Roosevelt read the book to her grandchildren.
Q 22Which Hollywood actress did Dahl marry in 1953?
Patricia Neal
Patricia Neal won the Best Actress Oscar for Hud, and after three burst aneurysms in 1965 she had to relearn how to walk and talk.
Q 23Dahl helped develop the Wade-Dahl-Till valve to treat which condition, after his son Theo was hit by a taxi?
Hydrocephalus
Hydrocephalus: the shunt valve Dahl built with an engineer and a neurosurgeon went on to help almost 3,000 children.
Q 14Dahl flew in his first aerial combat in April 1941 over which country?
Greece
Greece: after fighting in the Battle of Athens, he was evacuated to Egypt as the Germans pressed on the city.
Q 15Which fighter was Dahl flying when he shot down his first enemy plane?
Hawker Hurricane
Hawker Hurricane: he flew Hurricanes until worsening headaches made him black out, and he was invalided home to Britain.
Q 16In 1942 Dahl was posted to Washington, D.C. in what role?
Assistant air attaché
Assistant air attaché: his job was to win over isolationist Americans by giving pro-British speeches about his war service.
Q 17Which British novelist writing wartime propaganda in America asked Dahl to write down RAF anecdotes, prompting his first published story?
C. S. Forester
C. S. Forester met him in Washington in 1942, and the story Dahl wrote for him, 'A Piece of Cake', launched his writing career.
Q 18Which magazine retitled Dahl's first story 'Shot Down Over Libya'?
The Saturday Evening Post
The Saturday Evening Post changed the title, though Dahl had really crash-landed in the desert rather than been shot down.
Q 19Which spy novelist worked alongside Dahl promoting Britain's interests in wartime America?
Ian Fleming
Ian Fleming later created James Bond, and the same wartime circle included future advertising tycoon David Ogilvy.
Q 20Dahl passed intelligence to the Canadian spymaster William Stephenson, who is widely known by what name?
Intrepid
Intrepid: though the name stuck to him, historians say it was probably a telegraphic address rather than his wartime codename.
Q 24Roald Dahl's eldest daughter died aged seven in 1962 from complications of which disease?
Measles
Measles: Dahl later wrote a pamphlet, 'Measles: A Dangerous Illness', urging parents to have their children vaccinated.
Q 25To whom is The BFG dedicated?
His late daughter Olivia
His late daughter Olivia: her death left Dahl 'limp with despair', and he dedicated The BFG to her twenty years later.
Q 26The heroine of The BFG is named after which member of Dahl's family?
His granddaughter
His granddaughter Sophie Dahl was later discovered as a model by the fashion editor Isabella Blow.
Q 27What was the name of Dahl's home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, from 1954 until his death?
Gipsy House
Gipsy House: the local builder who helped remodel it, Wally Saunders, went on to inspire Dahl's BFG.
Q 28Which of these Charlie and the Chocolate Factory characters did Dahl rewrite after the NAACP raised concerns?
Oompa-Loompas
Oompa-Loompas were drawn as African pygmies in the first edition, so Dahl made them white and gave them a made-up home, Loompaland.
Q 29Dahl's The Vicar of Nibbleswicke is about a clergyman with a fictitious form of which condition?
Dyslexia
The vicar says words backwards; Dahl donated the rights to the Dyslexia Institute in London.
Q 30Which Dahl story, about a Cadillac wagered against a finger, did Tarantino adapt for Four Rooms?
'Man from the South'
'Man from the South' ends with a woman stopping the bet, and the hand she holds out has only a thumb and one finger left.