Books and Authors Questions and Answers

Answer: D

The Second Sex was written by Simone de Beauvoir.

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published Le Deuxieme Sexe in 1949. Its analysis of how women have been defined as the 'Other' made it a founding text of modern feminism.

Arundhati Roy wrote The God of Small Things, Roxane Gay Bad Feminist, and Joanne Rowling the Harry Potter series.

De Beauvoir's best-known line from the book is that one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.

Answer: B

Three Thousand Stitches was written by Sudha Murthy.

Sudha Murty's Three Thousand Stitches: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives (2017) is a collection of true stories; its title story tells of her work with the devadasi women of Karnataka, who later gave her a quilt of three thousand stitches.

Sushma Swaraj was a political leader, and the other two names are not associated with this book.

Sudha Murty, chairperson of the Infosys Foundation for many years, has written widely in both English and Kannada.

Answer: A

It was Pearl S. Buck.

She grew up in China as the daughter of missionaries, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1938, largely for The Good Earth. All Under Heaven, published in 1973, was among her last novels.

Answer: A

A Simple Path was written by Mother Teresa, compiled with Lucinda Vardey.

The book sets out her spiritual method in five steps - silence, prayer, faith, love and service. It reflects the working philosophy of the Missionaries of Charity, the order she founded in Calcutta in 1950.

Answer: D

Matters of Discretion: An Autobiography is by I.K. Gujral.

He was prime minister from 1997 to 1998 and is remembered for the Gujral Doctrine, which offered India's smaller neighbours concessions without expecting reciprocity.

Answer: B

The City of Joy was written by Dominique Lapierre, published in 1985.

It describes life in the Anand Nagar slum of Calcutta. Lapierre gave much of the royalties to charitable work in the city, and the book was filmed by Roland Joffé in 1992.

Answer: D

The 3 Mistakes of My Life was written by Chetan Bhagat, published in 2008.

It is set in Ahmedabad around the 2001 earthquake and the 2002 riots, and follows three friends and a cricket shop. It was filmed as Kai Po Che! in 2013.

Answer: C

Changing Village, Changing Life was written by Prafulla Mohanti.

He is an Odia writer and painter who left his village of Nanpur for London and returned repeatedly to record how it changed. His earlier book My Village, My Life described it as he first knew it.

Answer: D

Neela Chand was written by Shiv Prasad Singh, and won the Vyas Samman in 1992.

The Vyas Samman is given by the K.K. Birla Foundation for an outstanding Hindi literary work published in the preceding ten years.

Answer: C

It is attributed to Voltaire.

The sentence was not written by Voltaire but by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall in 1906, as a summary of his attitude to Helvetius. It has been quoted as his ever since.