The Author Challenge Trivia Quiz

Answer: Mexico

Octavio Paz Lozano was born in Mexico City, Mexico in March 31, 1914. He went to a private college in Mexico named Colegio Williams. "The Labyrinth of Solitude" was written as a nine essay book analysing Mexico. Octavio died in Mexico City on April 19, 1998.

Answer: USA

Thomas Coraghessan Boyle was born in New York in 1948. As a student, he attended the State University of New York in Potsdam. His third novel, "World's End" was written in 1987 and won him the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988.

Answer: Ireland

Eilis Dillon was born in Galway, Ireland in 1920. "Across the Bitter Glass" is her most famous novel published after her husband's death. Eilis died in 1994 with over fifty books having been published. She was buried next to her husband in Clare County, Ireland.

Answer: Ireland

Elizabeth was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1899. Elizabeth was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1948. "The House in Paris" was Elizabeth's fifth novel. Virginia Woolf was a fan of Elizabeth's writing.

Answer: India

Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie was born in India in 1947. He attended college in Mumbai and went on to the University of Cambridge. Before his first novel "Grimus" was published in 1975, Salman worked as a copywriter. His novel "Shame" (1983) won the Best Foreign Book Prize and was runner up for the Booker Prize. "Shame" was a political book about Pakistan.

He is also well known for the fatwa issued against him in February 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran. It pronounced him guilty of blasphemy and called for his death.

Answer: Denmark

Isak Dinesen is just one of three pseudonym's used by author Karen Blixen. She grew up in Denmark and studied art in Copenhagen, Paris and Rome. She moved to Africa with her first husband, Swedish Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and they lived on a coffee plantation. Her book "Out of Africa" is a memoir of her life with her first husband.

Answer: Scotland

Iain Banks was born in Scotland in 1954. He began writing at the age of eleven and his first novel was published at the age of sixteen. "The Player of Games" is the second book in a science fiction series known as the "Culture Series".

Answer: Greece

Niko Kazantzakis was born in 1883 in Crete, which was still under Ottoman rule at the time. He studied law in Athens and philosophy in Paris. He didn't become globally known as an author until his book "Zorba the Greek" became a movie in 1964. Unfortunately, he died seven years prior to the making of this movie.

Answer: Netherlands

Thomas Bernhard was born in Heerlen, Netherlands in 1931. Bernhard suffered from tuberculosis and spent three years of his life in a sanitarium before training as an actor in Salzburg. Bernhard wrote "Concrete" in 1982.

Answer: New Zealand

Nene Janet Paterson Clutha, also known by her pen name Janet Frame, was born in New Zealand in 1924. Janet attended the University of Otago and the Dunedin College of Education. She wrote several of her books while staying at a psychiatric hospital and then was transferred to an asylum.

She was days away from a lobotomy when one of the books of short stories she wrote won a New Zealand award.