50 free Samuel Beckett trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Samuel Beckett trivia quiz covers the Dublin-born writer who moved to Paris, switched to writing in French and produced the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century. The easy questions cover his nationality, his most famous play, the prize he won in 1969 and the great Irish novelist he assisted as a young man. From there the quiz walks through the life: Portora and Trinity, the lectureship he abandoned, the pimp who stabbed him, the Resistance network he ran messages for, the revelation in his mother's room and the partner who hawked the Godot manuscript to producers. The hard end covers the pseudonym, the poem about Descartes, the invented poet he lectured on, the trilogy of novels he refused to call a trilogy, the 35-second play, the funeral urns and the disembodied mouth, the wrestler he drove to school, the BBC script editor, the gravestone instruction and the nephew who now polices his stage directions. Expect questions for casual theatre-goers and for people who have read the letters. Every answer was checked against Beckett's encyclopaedia entry and the Waiting for Godot entry before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our James Joyce and classic literature quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which country was Samuel Beckett born?
Ireland
He was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock in 1906 but lived most of his adult life in Paris.
Q 02In which year did Beckett win the Nobel Prize in Literature?
1969
He heard the news on holiday in Tunis; his wife Suzanne called it a catastrophe.
Q 03Which Irish novelist did Beckett assist with research for Finnegans Wake?
James Joyce
They were introduced in Paris by the poet Thomas MacGreevy; the friendship cooled when Beckett rejected the novelist's daughter Lucia.
Q 04In which language did Beckett write most of his works after 1947, including his most famous play?
French
He said it was easier for him to write 'without style' in his adopted language, then translated almost everything into English himself.
Q 05Under what title was Beckett's most famous play first published, in 1952?
En attendant Godot
He composed it between October 1948 and January 1949 and never sold or gave away its manuscript.
Q 06What are the names of the two main characters in Beckett's most famous play?
Vladimir and Estragon
They call each other Didi and Gogo and pass the time by a leafless tree.
Q 07In Beckett's most famous play, what is the name of the servant who is led about on a rope by Pozzo?
Lucky
He delivers a long, torrential monologue when ordered to 'think'.
Q 08Who directed the 1953 Paris premiere of Beckett's most famous play at the Theatre de Babylone?
Roger Blin
Beckett's partner Suzanne had sent the manuscript to producer after producer before finding him.
Q 09Which painting did Beckett cite as a major inspiration for his most famous play?
Two Men Contemplating the Moon
Caspar David Friedrich painted it in 1819; Beckett was a serious student of art history throughout the 1930s.
Q 10In a 1998 poll by London's Royal National Theatre, what distinction was Beckett's best-known work voted?
Most significant English-language play of the 20th century
Ironically the London opening in 1955 drew mostly negative reviews until Harold Hobson and Kenneth Tynan turned the tide.
Q 11Which critic coined the term 'Theatre of the Absurd', with Beckett as its centrepiece?
Martin Esslin
Esslin tied the plays to Camus's idea of the absurd, which is why Beckett is often wrongly called an existentialist.
Q 12Where in Enniskillen, also attended by Oscar Wilde, was Beckett educated as a teenager?
Portora Royal School
He then went up to Trinity College Dublin to study modern literature and Romance languages.
Q 13Beckett is the only Nobel literature laureate to have played which sport at first-class level?
Cricket
A left-handed batsman and left-arm bowler, he played twice for Dublin University against Northamptonshire and so appears in Wisden.
Q 21What happened to Beckett on a Paris street in January 1938?
He was stabbed by a pimp
He dropped the charges, partly because he found his attacker, Prudent, likeable and well-mannered.
Q 22Which art collector had a brief affair with Beckett around 1937 and nicknamed him 'Oblomov'?
Peggy Guggenheim
The nickname came from Goncharov's famously lethargic fictional nobleman.
Q 23With which artist did Beckett regularly play chess in Left Bank cafes?
Marcel Duchamp
He also befriended Alberto Giacometti and chose to stay in Paris after war broke out.
Q 14At which Paris institution did Beckett work as an English lecteur from 1928 to 1930?
Ecole Normale Superieure
It was there that Thomas MacGreevy introduced him to Joyce.
Q 15Beckett's prize-winning 1930 poem 'Whoroscope' draws on a biography of which philosopher?
Rene Descartes
He was reading the biography when encouraged to enter, and dashed the poem off in a hurry.
Q 16What was unusual about the poet Jean du Chas and le Concentrisme, subject of Beckett's 1930 Trinity lecture?
Both were entirely his own invention
He later insisted the parody was not meant to fool the audience; he resigned his lectureship the next year.
Q 17What was Beckett's first novel, written in 1932 but not published until 1992?
Dream of Fair to Middling Women
After many rejections he abandoned it, but mined it for poems and the story collection More Pricks Than Kicks.
Q 18What was Beckett's first published novel, from 1938, with chess and insanity among its themes?
Murphy
Its opening line reads: 'The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.'
Q 19Which psychoanalyst treated Beckett at London's Tavistock Clinic for two years after his father's death?
Wilfred Bion
Traces of the analysis surface in his later novels and plays.
Q 20In 1936 Beckett wrote to which Soviet film director offering himself as an apprentice?
Sergei Eisenstein
The letter was lost because the director was quarantined during a smallpox outbreak.
Q 24What was the name of the Resistance network for which Beckett worked as a courier?
Reseau Gloria
After it was betrayed in 1942 he and Suzanne fled on foot to the village of Roussillon.
Q 25How did Beckett later describe his Resistance work?
"Boy scout stuff"
France nonetheless awarded him the Croix de Guerre in 1945.
Q 26Which novel did Beckett write while hiding in the village of Roussillon during the war?
Watt
Started in 1941 and finished in 1945, it did not appear in print until 1953.
Q 27After the war Beckett managed stores at an Irish Red Cross hospital in which Normandy town?
Saint-Lo
He described it in an unbroadcast radio script called 'The Capital of the Ruins'.
Q 28Where did Beckett have the 1945 'revelation' that set the direction of his later work?
His mother's room in Dublin
He realised his way lay in 'impoverishment' and subtraction, the opposite of Joyce's ever-expanding method.
Q 29Which Beckett play fictionalises the revelation, with a man hearing tapes of his younger self?
Krapp's Last Tape
Krapp fast-forwards before the audience can hear the key words, which Beckett said were 'precious ally'.
Q 30Which magazine, edited by Sartre, mistakenly printed only half of Beckett's 'Suite' in 1946?
Les Temps modernes
Co-editor Simone de Beauvoir refused to print the second half.