1. Which macho novelist spent the first four years of his life dressed as a girl?
2. Which Nobel Prize-winning poet was inspired by his wife’s automatic writing?
3. Les Miserables is the longest-running musical in London’s West End but who wrote the original novel?
4. Which Jane Austen novel was Mark Twain talking about when he said ‘Every time I read [ ]I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone’?
5. What was the unusual cure Victor Hugo had for writer’s block?
6. Jane Austen never married but she was engaged for one night. Name the man she was engaged to?
7. Name the author who said the only reason he wrote was so that he/she could rush ‘off to Mexico to catch volcano rabbits’?
8. Which iconic feline character was reputedly inspired by cheese moulds?
9. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, was well known for his powers of deduction and debunking the supernatural but which fantasy creatures did Doyle believe were real?
10. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was not the first writer to kill off Sherlock Holmes. Who was?
11. Which famous Irish novelist was not only born in the same year as Virginia Woolf but also died in the same year as her?
12. What chocolate collection was named after a comic play by JM Barrie?
13. James Joyce liked to go out drinking in Paris in the 1920s and would often end up in drunken brawls. Which famous American novelist did he often ask to protect him?
14. Which famous explorer was considered for the role of James Bond but was eventually rejected for having ‘hands too big and the face of a farmer’?
15. Which famous Irish writer is in the crowd of people on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?
16. What well-known song did Sting write at the same desk that Ian Fleming wrote his James Bond novels?
17. In 1890 William Butler Yeats joined a secret society called the Golden Dawn. What did the society supposedly practice?
18. William Butler Yeats proposed to Maud Gonne five times and was rejected each time. When he finally gave up who did he ask next?
19. Name the poet who may have someone else’s body in his grave?
20. What job did Shakespeare’s father have that would be the envy of many people today?
21. Charlestown in Cornwall was used as a filming location in the BBC’s latest adaption of Poldark. It has also featured in a famous film and TV show. What were they?
22. Who was the character Demelza in Poldark based on?
23. The co-founder of Microsoft Paul Allen paid an undisclosed sum for the original manuscript of which book?
Answers
1. Ernest Hemingway
2. WB Yeats
3. Victor Hugo
4. Pride and Prejudice
5. He would take all his clothes off and give them to his servant with strict instructions that they were not to be returned until he had written something.
6. Harris Bigg-Wither
7. Gerald Durrell
8. Alice in Wonderland’s Cheshire Cat
9. Fairies
10. JM Barrie
11. James Joyce
12. Quality Street
13. Ernest Hemingway
14. Sir Ranulph Fiennes
15. Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw (one or all was accepted as correct)
16. Every Breath You Take
17. Ritual Magic
18. Her daughter Iseult
19. WB Yeats
20. Beer taster
21. Dr Who and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
22. Winston Graham’s wife Jean Williamson
23. Dracula
The winner is Mary McCauley, who will now receive 24 titles from the Macmillan Collector's Library,
