All About the Writer Trivia Quiz

Answer: Virgil

He was born Publius Vergilius Maro in 70 B.C. in the commune since named for him (Virgilio) in what is now the Lombardy region of northern Italy. Ranked as one of the most important poets of all time, he lived and worked during the Augustan period of ancient Roman literature. Based on Homer's famous epic poems of seven centuries earlier, the "Aeneid" follows the journey of Aeneas, a Trojan refugee.
Virgil's influence on more recent Western literature is illustrated in Dante's "Divine Comedy", in which he acts as Dante's guide through the levels of hell and purgatory.

Answer: Sanskrit

Fragments of drama written in Sanskrit exist from as far back as the 2nd Century B.C., but it is Kālidāsa's work in the 3rd or 4th Century that marks the beginnings of theater in India. His works are based primarily on the ancient Hindu text eulogizing various deities known as the "Puranas".

His major plays include 'Abhijñānaśākuntalam' ("Of Shakuntala recognized by a token") which was one of the first Sanskrit literary works to be translated into English. The play tells the story of King Agnimitra, the "Destroyer of Evil", a great mythological Indian king from the 4th Century B.C.

Answer: Sully Prudhomme

Born René François Armand Prudhomme in Paris in 1839, he is probably less remembered for his actual poetry than as the first recipient, in 1901, of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The alternatives are three more French writers who won the Nobel Literature prize: poet Frédéric Mistral shared the 1904 award with Spaniard José Echegaray; novelist Romain Rolland won in 1915; and philosopher Henri Bergson in 1927.

Answer: Tamil

The first of the "Five Great Epics of the Tamil Language" was "Cilappatikāram", an epic poem by Ilango Adigal, a Chera prince, who lived in the 1st Cntury A.D. The next two are both Buddhist texts, "Manimekalai" written by Sīthalai Sāttanār sometime between the 1st and 5th Century, and "Kuṇṭalakēci", by either Nagakuthanar or Nagasena in the 5th Century.

The last two are both Jain religious works: "Valayapathi" was written by an unknown Jain ascetic in the 9th Century and "Cīvaka Cintāmaṇi" by Tirutakkatevar in the 10th Century.

Answer: Henrik Ibsen

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born in 1828 in the city of Skien in the traditional region of Grenland in the Kingdom of Sweden and Norway (now in Telemark county in southern Norway).

Ibsen's major dramatic works include "Peer Gynt", "A Doll's House", "Hedda Gabler" and "The Master Builder". There are realistic (but unsubstantiable) claims that he is the Western world's most performed dramatist after Shakespeare. There is no doubt that he is one of Europe's greatest ever playwrights, and many regard him as the most important dramatist since Shakespeare.

He died in 1906 aged 78 after a series of strokes.

Answer: Portuguese

He was born Luís Vaz de Camões around 1524. His birthplace is not known, although Lisbon, Coimbra and Alenquer all claim he was born there, and a statue of him can be seen in the central Portuguese city of Constância, too. It is known that his family originated in Galicia in the north of the country.

One of his best-known works is 'Os Lusíadas', published in 1572. It is an epic poem written in Homeric style that tells the stories of the various Portuguese voyages of discovery around the world during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Answer: T.S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in Saint Louis, Missouri. He moved to England in 1914 and in 1927 he became a naturalized British citizen and renounced his American citizenship. The 1922 epic poem referred to in the question is "The Waste Land", in which he cleverly interweaves the legend of the Holy Grail into contemporary life in Britain.

Answer: Hungary

Miklós Zrínyi was born into a noble family in 1620 in the city of Csáktornya (now Čakovec in northern Croatia), then part of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Habsburg Empire. A successful military commander during the Thirty Years War against the Anti-Habsburg Allies, during the winter of 1648-49 he wrote his magnum opus, 'Szigeti veszedelem or Zrínyiász' ("The Peril of Sziget") which was published in Vienna two years later.

The poem tells the story of his great-grandfather's heroic but unsuccessful defense of the fortress of Szigetvár, which blocked Suleiman's line of advance towards Vienna in 1566.

Answer: The Canterbury Tales

The Ellesmere Manuscript is an early 15-Century illuminated manuscript of Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales". This is one of the earliest of the few manuscripts that have survived: only 83 are known, and many of those are just fragments. The earliest surviving manuscript post-dates Chaucer's death in 1400. Caxton's first printed version, dating to 1478, is counted amongst the 83. In addition to writing one of the most significant of all early English-language works, Geoffrey Chaucer was also the first person to be interred in what is now called "Poet's Corner" in Westminster Abbey.

In addition to those mentioned in the question, the remains of Samuel Johnson,John Masefield, Richard Sheridan, Edmund Spencer and Alfred Tennyson are also buried here.

There are also memorials to John Betjeman, Jane Austen, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Browning, Robert Burns, Lord Byron and all three Bronte sisters (amongst many others).

Answer: Aristophanes

Aristophanes was born in Athens around 446 B.C. Remarkably, of the thirty plays that he wrote, eleven have survived virtually complete. A contemporary of Plato and Socrates, Aristophanes was also a comic poet as well as a playwright. He died in Delphi around 386 B.C.

The alternatives are also ancient Greek dramatists, although they are the three great tragedians whose plays have survived.