Name the Author: A Literary Quiz

1. Which author only turned to professional writing at the age of forty after being diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour?
2. Who wrote an operetta based on James Joyce’s Ulysses, called Blooms of Dublin that was televised by the BBC in 1982?
3. Who wrote the script to the world-famous filmed version of the Jesus story, Jesus of Nazareth?
4. Which author wrote 33 novels and 25 non-fiction books in 33 years?
5. Who wrote a novel about the life of Napoleon, following the compositional structure of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony?
6. In whose futuristic dystopian novel, The Wanting Seed, does overpopulation become such a problem that governments encourage homosexuality with the slogan, ’It’s sapiens to be homo’?
7. Whose updated version of the Oedipus myth, set in Harlem, New York, was called MF (M****r F****r)?
8. Who wrote the novelisation of the love life of William Shakespeare, Nothing Like the Sun?
9. Whose last, non-posthumous novel, Dead Man in Deptford, was about the life and death of Christopher Marlowe?
10. Which English author was arrested in Spain for calling Franco a ‘filthy swine’?
11. Who invented the slang-language Nadsat, based on a mix of Cockney Rhyming slang, 1960s Gang Slang and Russian, used in the infamous novel A Clockwork Orange?
12. Which 20th century author spoke 10 languages, including Hebrew, Malay, Russian, Chinese and Welsh?
13. Who was twice given 12 months to live, outliving the first occasion by the 33 years?
14. Which author famous for his novels, was also a composer of over 250 musical works?
15. Who conversed in Anglo-Saxon with Jorge Luis Borges at an American Embassy function, as it was the only language they thought could not be understood by CIA operatives listening to their conversation?
16. Who, when asked by a young Greek-Cypriot fan in 1991 at a book signing in Dillons, Gower Street, said his favourite food was Lamb or Lancashire Hot Pot?
17. Which author had to flee his home in Italy with his wife and young son, because of mafia threats to kidnap his son?
18. Whose novel, ABBA ABBA, is about the last days of the dying John Keats?
19. Who has written the most perspicuous elucidation of the work of James Joyce in titles such as Joysprick and Here Comes Everybody?
20. Who wrote an anonymous and not very positive review of one of his own books for The Yorkshire Post?
21. Who died on 22nd November 1993, the same date (but not year) as JFK and Aldous Huxley?
22. Whose Mozart 200th anniversary tribute in 1991 was a book of essays and scripts called Mozart and the Wolf Gang?
23. Which author translated Cyrano de Bergerac, Oedipus and Carmen for the stage?
24. Which author’s history essay at Manchester University was marked by AJP Taylor with the comments, “Bright ideas insufficient to conceal lack of knowledge”?
25. Which author said in a lecture that “Germans consider that Schlegel’s version of Shakespeare is better than the original, and in some ways it is”?
26. Who wrote in the first of his two volumes of autobiography, “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now”?
27. Which author, who is known by another name, was called John Wilson at birth?
28. Which author scripted a scene for the James Bond film The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), where a bad-guy is thrown into a cauldron of boiling water, and Bond pauses to add a dash of soy sauce. The scene was not filmed.

James Neophytou