The Book Quiz: ‘Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man’

1. Who was announced this week as the official biographer of Seamus Heaney?

a) Peter Fallon

b) Roy Foster

c) Eavan Boland

d) Fintan O’Toole

Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland review

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Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of US Power in the Pacific Century by Richard McGregor review: ‘Unatural intimacies’

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Are we now close to meeting ET?

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2. What was the name of Seamus Heaney’s last collection of poetry, in 2010?

a) The Spirit Level

b) Human Chain

c) Electric Light

d)District and Circle

3. Who has won the 2017 Goldsmiths Prize?

a) Sara Baume

b) Jon McGregor

c) Nicola Barker

d) Will Self

4. Dorothy Macardle’s 1941 novel Uneasy Freehold was made into a film in 1944 called?

a) The Uneasy

b) The Unforeseen

c) The Unsub

d) The Uninvited

5. Before becoming a novelist, at what was Conversations with Friends author Sally Rooney a European champion?

a) Swimming

b) Debating

c) Fencing

d) Spelling

6. Which Irish playwright advised the International Commission on the Use of English in the Liturgy on translating the Latin Mass?

a) Brian Friel

b) Tom Murphy

c) Bernard Farrell

d) Samuel Beckett

7. Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds is based on an original short story by whom?

a) AS Byatt

b) Katherine Mansfield

c) Daphne du Maurier

d) DH Lawrence

8. Which Irish play has a scene set in an alehouse called The Three Pigeons?

a) Synge's The Playboy of the Western World

b) Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer

c) Sheridan's The Rivals

d)O'Casey's The Silver Tassie

9. In Yeats’s poem The Wild Swans at Coole how many swans does the poet recall seeing “upon the brimming water among the stones’’?

a) 29

b) 39

c) 49

d) 59

10. What is the name of the boy who befriends the kestrel in Barry Hines’s 1968 novel A Kestrel for a Knave?

a) Terry

b) Mikey

c) Billy

d) Bertie

Answers: 1 – d; 2 – b; 3 – c; 4 – d; 5 – b; 6 – b; 7 – c; 8 – b; 9 – d; 10 – c