Fictional Places in Literature Quiz

Answer: Doctor Dolittle

Hugh John Lofting was born in 1886 in Maidenhead, Berkshire and served with the Irish Guards during World War I, but he is best-remembered today as the author of the popular children's books featuring Doctor Dolittle. The character first appeared in letters written from the trenches of WWI and the first of Lofting's twelve books, "The Story of Doctor Dolittle", was published in 1920.

The full title of the book was actually "The Story of Doctor Dolittle: Being the History of His Peculiar Life at Home and Astonishing Adventures in Foreign Parts Never Before Printed". Lofting died in 1947 and the final three books were published posthumously over the following five years.

The final installment, published in 1952, was "Doctor Dolittle's Puddleby Adventures".

Answer: Greyfriars

Billy Bunter was created by English writer Charles Harold St. John Hamilton, writing under the pen name Frank Richards. Bunter (full name William George Bunter) first appeared in the first issue of "Magnet" comic in 1908. Following the closure of "Magnet" in 1940, the first novel, "Billy Bunter of Greyfriars School", was published in 1947. Hamilton died in 1961 and the last Bunter novel was published posthumously in 1967.

Answer: Terry Pratchett

Ankh-Morpork is the largest city and the mercantile capital of Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" universe. A mixture of a modern, multi-cultural metropolis with elements of renaissance Florence, Ankh-Morpork is nicknamed "The Great Wahoonie" just as New York City is "The Big Apple".
The Unseen University is the universe's premier school of wizardry. The exploits of the university's head wizard has been central in more than a dozen novels in the "Discworld" series.

Answer: Stephen King

The haunted Overlook Hotel is the setting for Stephen King's third novel, "The Shining", published in 1977, and the subsequent 1980 blockbuster Stanley Kubrick film starring Jack Nicholson.
King based the location on the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, where he and his wife Tabitha once stayed and found themselves the only guests in the rambling premises.

Answer: Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in the small village of Stinsford, on the outskirts of Dorchester in southwestern Dorset. Hardy set all of his novels in southern England, in an area he designated as "Wessex" after the pre-Norman Conquest medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that once existed there. Specifically, Christminster, based on Oxford, is where Jude Fawley goes to become a scholar in "Jude the Obscure". Kingsbere, based on Bere Regis, is the location for the Church of the d'Urbervilles in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". Sandbourne, based on Bournemouth, is the setting for a funeral in "Jude the Obscure" and a murder in "Tess of the d'Urbervilles". Budmouth, based on Weymouth, is where Frank Troy goes to the horse races in "Far From the Madding Crowd".

Answer: Grantchester Grind

Published in 1995, 21 years after the original, "Grantchester Grind" was the second Tom Sharpe novel set at the fictional Porterhouse College. By this time, Skullion has been elevated from head porter to Master. The novel follows his attempts to raise funds for the college.
Tom Sharpe was a graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Answer: Reverend Wilbert Awdry

Wilbert Vere Awdry OBE was born in 1911 in the Hampshire village of Ampfield. An Anglican cleric, a children's writer and a railway enthusiast, he created the "Railway Series" books. The first book, published in 1945 was "The Three Railway Engines" which introduced Edward the Blue Engine, Henry the Green Engine Gordon the Big Engine and The Fat Director. Thomas the Tank Engine, who would become the series' most popular character, made his debut in the second book a year later. The 26th and final book in the original series, "Tramway Engines", was published in 1972.
Following the retirement of the Reverend Awdry, the series was resurrected in 1983 by his son, Christopher, who wrote a further sixteen books between 1983 and 2011.
The Reverend W Audry died aged 85 in 1997.

Of the alternatives, Marian Potter wrote "The Little Red Caboose"; Chris van Allsburg wrote and illustrated "Polar Express"; and Edith Nesbit wrote "The Railway Children".

Answer: William Faulkner

He was born William Cuthbert Faulkner in 1897 in the city of New Albany in northern Mississippi. He was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, thus becoming the first (and 65 years on still the only) Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. He also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, for "A Fable" in 1954 and for "The Reivers" (his final novel) in 1962.

He died in July 1962 aged 64. Faulkner's best-known novels include "The Sound and the Fury", published in 1929, "As I Lay Dying" (1930), "Light in August" (1932) and "Absalom, Absalom!" (1936). All but three of Faulkner's novels are set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County.

Answer: Great Britain

George Orwell's magnum opus paints a picture of a world in a perpetual state of war, where a citizen's every action, word and even thought is scrutinized by the state security services. Most of the action takes place in the relatively minor province of the superstate Oceania known as "Airstrip One", which is purportedly what Great Britain has become in Orwell's new world order. Although Orwell underestimated how long it might take for society to degenerate from 1949 to his vision of the future, there can be little doubt that we are moving inexorably in that direction with the growth of CCTV surveillance, mobile phone and Internet information gathering, "Big Brother" and the "Nanny State". Scary indeed!

Answer: Joseph Conrad

He was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 in the city of Berdychiv in what was then part of the Russian empire and is now in northern Ukraine. It is remarkable that Joseph Conrad did not even learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties, and yet he still became one of the world's greatest writers in that language.
Conrad's 1904 novel "Nostromo" is set in the port of Sulaco, in the occidental region of the imaginary country of Costaguana in South America. The geography of the country as described in the book suggests that it was probably based on Colombia.