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Test Your Knowledge: The Nobel Prize in Literature

This quiz challenges your knowledge about the Nobel Prize in Literature, including its origins, notable laureates, and the controversies surrounding the prize.

#Nobel Prize #Literature #Awards #Authors #History

1 Where does Nobel Prize in Literature come from?

2 Who is the presenter of Nobel Prize in Literature?

3 A Literature Nobel Prize laureate earns a gold medal, a diploma bearing a ________, and a sum of money.

4 In 1964 ________ was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he declined it, stating that "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner."

5 French novelist and intellectual André Malraux was seriously considered for the prize in the 1950s, according to Swedish Academy archives studied by newspaper ________ on their opening in 2008.

6 [40] Salman Rushdie and ________ had been strongly favoured to receive the Prize, but the Nobel organisers were later quoted as saying that they would have been "too predictable, too popular."[41]

7 ________ requested in his last will and testament that his money be used to create a series of prizes for those who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind" in physics, chemistry, peace, physiology or medicine, and literature.

8 Each year the Swedish Academy sends out requests for nominations of candidates for the Nobel Prize in ________.

9 [44] The issue of their "political stance" was also raised in response to the awards of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Orhan Pamuk and ________ in 2006 and 2007, respectively.

10 There was also criticism of the academy's refusal to express support for Salman Rushdie in 1989, after Ayatollah ________ issued a fatwa calling for Rushdie to be killed, and two members of the Academy resigned over its refusal to support Rushdie.

💡 Interesting Facts

  • famed Japanese literary critic Kobayashi Hideo toured China as a guest of the Imperial Japanese Army, with future Nobel-prize winner Kawabata Yasunari.
  • notable figures buried at New Cemetery in Belgrade include Ivo Andrić, winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature, and Zoran Đinđić, the Prime Minister of Serbia who was assassinated in 2003.
  • the Swedish culture magazine Artes often featured future Nobel Prize in Literature laureates when edited by Östen Sjöstrand, a member of the Swedish Academy.
  • The Land of Green Plums by Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller, depicting life in a totalitarian state, became a favorite of Iranian activist Mohammad-Ali Abtahi soon after he was released from jail.
  • confraternities, a type of Nigerian university student organization started by Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka, are now linked with organized crime.
  • Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney's poem "January God" is about a stone sculpture called the Boa Island Janus figure (pictured).
  • poet Robert Hass, a two-term American Poet Laureate, is a neighbor of Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz.
  • Bertrand Russell is the longest-lived of any Nobel Prize in Literature winner.
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