Literature Quiz: 18 Questions on Books and Authors

Literature questions are kinder than people expect. You rarely need to have finished the book; you need to know who wrote it and roughly what happens, which is knowledge that leaks into everyone through films and conversation.

Easy literature questions

1. Who wrote Romeo and Juliet? — William Shakespeare
2. Which boy wizard attends Hogwarts? — Harry Potter
3. Who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories? — Arthur Conan Doyle
4. In which book does a girl fall down a rabbit hole? — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
5. Who wrote The Old Man and the Sea? — Ernest Hemingway
6. What is a very long fictional story called? — A novel

Medium literature questions

1. Who wrote Pride and Prejudice? — Jane Austen
2. Which novel begins ‘Call me Ishmael’? — Moby-Dick
3. Who wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude? — Gabriel García Márquez
4. Which Russian author wrote War and Peace? — Leo Tolstoy
5. Who created the character Hercule Poirot? — Agatha Christie
6. Which prize is the highest honour in literature? — The Nobel Prize in Literature

Hard literature questions

1. Who wrote the epic poem The Divine Comedy? — Dante Alighieri
2. Which Egyptian author won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988? — Naguib Mahfouz
3. What is the oldest surviving epic poem? — The Epic of Gilgamesh
4. Who wrote Things Fall Apart? — Chinua Achebe
5. Which novel features the character Winston Smith? — Nineteen Eighty-Four
6. Who wrote the Muqaddimah? — Ibn Khaldun

Opening lines make excellent quiz questions because they are short, quotable and unambiguous — far better than plot questions, which invite arguments.