Even with the Whanganui Literary Festival cancelled, Midweek decided to proceed with this fun quiz compiled by David Scoullar.
1. Which female children's author enjoyed playing tennis in the nude?
2. Which writer/playwright changed his name to Sebastian Melmoth?
3. This famous detective novelist went missing for 11 days in 1926.
4. Which American author stole a urinal from a bar and took it home?
5. This novelist's masterpiece struck a chord with big-name rock bands.
6. This Irish novelist was an astrophobic, someone with an intense fear of thunder and lightning.
7. Which British novelist would climb mulberry trees totally naked to help stimulate his imagination?
8. When asked how he was able to write battle scenes with such accuracy, this author said he learned all he needed to know about war from football.
9. Which famous author was also a serious lepidopterologist or studier of butterflies?
10. What is Winnie the Pooh's favourite day?
Quiz Answers
1. Enid Blyton. Nude tennis was described as "a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes".
2. Oscar Wilde. After release from prison, he took this name after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of Melmoth the Wanderer, a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, his great-uncle.
3. Agatha Christie. Among various theories for the disappearance, which caused a sensation, are loss of memory and a nervous breakdown.
4. Ernest Hemingway. He argued that he had "pissed away" so much money in the bar that he deserved to own the urinal.
5. William Golding's Lord of the Flies. U2 took the name of their song Shadows and Tall Trees from the novel and Iron Maiden released a track called Lord of the Flies.
6. James Joyce. Biographers believe he developed this fear when his Catholic teachers told him thunder was a sign of God's wrath.
7. D H Lawrence.
8. Stephen Crane, author of the Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage.
9. Vladimir Nabokov. He was a Comparative Zoology research fellow at Harvard where much of his butterfly collection remains.
10. Today.
Six correct — good; 8 — very good; 10 — genius!
