Books and Authors in News Questions and Answers

Answer: B

The author is Varun Gandhi.

The Indian Metropolis: Deconstructing India's Urban Spaces, published in 2023, is Varun Gandhi's study of urbanisation in India, covering housing, migration, urban governance and the development models of Indian cities.

Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh and Madhav Gadgil are well-known authors, but this book is not theirs; Gadgil is known for his work on ecology and the Western Ghats, and Ghosh for his novels and writing on climate.

Answer: C

The correct pair is 'Water in a Broken Pot' - Yogesh Maitreya.

Water in a Broken Pot (2023) is a memoir by the Dalit poet, translator and publisher Yogesh Maitreya, about growing up in Nagpur and coming to writing.

The other pairs are swapped or wrong. Raw Umber is a novel by Sara Rai, and Smoke and Ashes is Amitav Ghosh's history of the opium trade, so the first two options exchange their authors. Indrani Mukherjee's 2023 memoir is titled Unbroken, not Homeless.

Answer: A

The correct match is a-iv, b-iii, c-ii, d-i.

• Mahatma Gandhi wrote Guide to London in the early 1890s for Indians going to study in England.
• Jawaharlal Nehru wrote Whither India? in 1933.
• Dr. B.R. Ambedkar wrote Thoughts on Pakistan (1940), later published as Pakistan or the Partition of India.
• Lala Lajpat Rai wrote The Political Future of India (1919).

Option B swaps Ambedkar's and Lajpat Rai's books, and options C and D credit Gandhi with Ambedkar's book on Pakistan.

Answer: A

The prize went to The English Patient.

To mark the Booker Prize's fiftieth anniversary in 2018, the 'Golden Man Booker' was awarded to the best of the 51 winning novels, chosen in a public vote from a shortlist of five, one for each decade. Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, the joint winner of 1992, was announced the winner in July 2018.

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy won the regular prize in 1997 but not the Golden Man Booker. Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie was longlisted in 2017 and was never a winner, and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) predates the prize by almost a century.