1. 

   “I have been bitten, I must avoid infection/Or else I’ll be as dead as Naipaul’s fiction.” Who reignited a feud with VS Naipaul by reading a poem about the author at a literary festival?

   1. Martin Amis

   2. Derek Walcott

   3. Pam Ayres

   4. Salman Rushdie

2. Who was successfully sued by JK Rowling this year?

   1. Warner Brothers

   2. An Australian newspaper for alleging that her books weren’t very good

   3. Small Michigan-based publisher RDR Books

   4. The parents of a child christened Harry Potter

3. Which author followed Martin Amis into controversy this year over their comments about Islamism?

   1. Ian McEwan

   2. Will Self

   3. Salman Rushdie

   4. Jackie Collins

4. Which bookshop cancelled a poetry reading after protests from a Christian activist group?

   1. WHSmith

   2. Borders

   3. Waterstone's

   4. Ottakar's

5. Why did The Horse Whisperer author Nicholas Evans end up in hospital this autumn?

   1. A horse attacked him

   2. He ate poisonous mushrooms

   3. He "felt like a rest"

   4. He was bitten by a snake

6. 

   Who was picked to write a sequel to Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”?

   1. Sebastian Faulks

   2. Eoin Colfer

   3. Robert Rankin

   4. Ian Fleming

7. JK Rowling’s latest addition to the Harry Potter universe, The Tales of Beedle the Bard, was the year’s fastest-selling book. How many copies did it sell in the UK in its first three days on sale?

   1. 50,000

   2. 368,000

   3. 715,000

   4. 4m

8. “I want to go for a walk, enjoy the sun, walk in the rain and see my mother without fear - and without frightening her.” Said who?

   1. Dracula, in a reimagining of the classic story for the modern age

   2. Katie Price, worried about the results of her latest round of plastic surgery

   3. Roberto Saviano, after receiving death threats from the Comorra, the Neapolitan mafia, in the wake of writing an exposé

   4. Tony Blair

9. 

   What did Terry Pratchett describe as an embuggerance?

   1. His early onset Alzheimer’s

   2. Fan fiction on the internet

   3. Selling fewer books than JK Rowling

   4. Never being shortlisted for the Booker prize

10. “This was the beginning of something new, something terrible. Soon I would be lying on my bed beneath him, squashed like a scarab beetle, flailing and sobbing while he slammed himself against me. He would not want to hurt me, but how could he help it? It’s always painful the first time.” From what?

    1. Belle de Jour in her latest call girl adventure

    2. Sherry Jones in her novel The Jewel of Medina

    3. Cherie Blair in her autobiography Speaking for Myself

    4. John Updike in The Widows of Eastwick

11. “Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.” According to?

    1. Philip Pullman on learning that his Northern Lights was one of the most challenged books in American libraries

    2. Richard Dawkins, speaking about the atheist bus campaign

    3. Archbishop Rowan Williams

    4. Christopher Hitchens, after losing an arm wrestling competition with Cliff Richard

12. 

    How many novels had Rose Tremain written before she won the Orange prize for fiction for her novel The Road Home?

    1. None

    2. Four

    3. Nine

    4. 20

13. What was the winner of this year’s Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction?

    1. Patrick French’s biography of VS Naipaul

    2. Blood River: A Journey to Africa’s Broken Heart by Tim Butcher

    3. The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

    4. Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

14. 

    “I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who was profoundly, clinically depressed. You need to work at the novel a little.” Which book, the winner of this year’s overall Costa prize, was judge Joanna Trollope talking about?

    1. Stef Penney’s A Tenderness of Wolves

    2. AL Kennedy’s Day

    3. Catherine O’Flynn’s What Was Lost

    4. Katie Price’s Crystal

15. Which poet was passed over yet again in this year’s Forward prize?

    1. Carol Ann Duffy

    2. Mick Imlah

    3. Seamus Heaney

    4. Pam Ayres

16. 

    This year marked the 400th anniversary of John Milton’s birth. But how does he start his epic poem, Paradise Lost?

    1. Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste / Brought Death into the World

    2. The Lord God said unto the woman, / What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, / The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat

    3. A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round / As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames / No light, but rather darkness visible

    4. Please allow me to introduce myself/ I'm a man of wealth and taste / I've been around for long, long years/ Stole many men's soul and faith

17. Who would have reached their 100th birthday on 28 May this year?

    1. Jane Austen

    2. Jack Kerouac

    3. TS Eliot

    4. Ian Fleming

18. Which Japanese epic turned 1,000 this year?

    1. Memoirs of a Geisha

    2. The Tale of Genji

    3. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

    4. The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter

19. The Booker prize was 40 this year. What was voted the “Booker of Bookers” in honour of the anniversary?

    1. The Life of Pi by Yann Martel

    2. Disgrace by JM Coetzee

    3. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

    4. The Bone People by Keri Hulme

20. Another important prize celebrated an anniversary this year: the Diagram prize for the oddest book title turned 30. What was voted top winner of the last 30 years?

    1. People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It

    2. How to Avoid Huge Ships

    3. American Bottom Archaeology

    4. Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers

21. 

    What controversy broke out over this year’s Nobel prize for literature?

    1. The jury couldn’t decide between eventual winner JMG Le Clézio and Claudio Magris, so tossed a coin

    2. One of the jury members said that the prize should never go to a woman

    3. Le Clézio decided to give his winnings to charity

    4. A member of the jury described American writing as insular and ignorant

22. 

    What was the name of the book by a former police officer which Salman Rushdie sued over?

    1. From Fatwa to Knighthood

    2. On Her Majesty’s Service

    3. Scruffy: My Life with Sir Salman

    4. Salman Fishing in the Yemen

23. What was so controversial about Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, which was dropped by Random House US and subsequently saw the house of its UK publisher firebombed?

    1. It was a fictionalised account of the relationship between Muhammad and his child bride Aisha

    2. It included cartoons of Muhammad

    3. It was anti-Christian

    4. It was excruciatingly bad

24. Which campaign has garnered over 820 signatures from children’s authors?

    1. The campaign to reintroduce the Net Book Agreement

    2. The "Kill Harry Potter" campaign

    3. The campaign against age-ranging children’s books

    4. The campaign to stop Google uploading books in copyright

25. 

    Which of these politicians didn’t publish their memoirs this year?

    1. Paddy Ashdown

    2. John Prescott

    3. Lord Levy

    4. Menzies Campbell

26. And which of the following celebrities did?

    1. Kylie Minogue

    2. Jason Donovan

    3. Barbara Windsor

    4. Cliff Richard

27. What is the real title of Jonathan Ross’s autobiography, which hasn’t done too well this Christmas?

    1. Why Do I Say These Things?

    2. From Rossy with Love

    3. Hating the Spotlight

    4. My Struggle

28. 

    What book topped Travelodge’s list of books most often abandoned in a hotel room?

    1. John Prescott’s Prezza: My Story

    2. Cherie Blair’s Speaking For Myself

    3. Russell Brand’s My Booky Wook

    4. The Kama Sutra

29. 

    What did research for the National Year of Reading suggest was the best book to impress a woman with?

    1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

    2. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela

    3. The Domestic Goddess by Nigella Lawson

    4. The Collins Street Atlas

30. Which author, shortly before their death, said they would have liked to have seen evidence of extra-terrestrial life during their lifetime?

    1. John Wyndham

    2. Barbara Cartland

    3. Isaac Asimov

    4. Arthur C Clarke

31. Why did the late Michael Crichton cause upset with his novel State of Fear?

    1. It was marked with an “over 21s only” sticker

    2. It did not feature any dinosaurs, as readers had expected

    3. It argued that attributing global warming to human activity was speculation, not fact

    4. It said that God was dead

32. 

    What is the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn's celebrated work about the Soviet labour camps called?

    1. Misery

    2. The Gulag Archipelago

    3. A People's Tragedy

    4. Holiday Camp

33. “One went to bed in suits, in those days, a thickish jacket and a thickish pair of trousers particularly thick at the waist, because of the thick cord that went through it, the ends of which one tied in a burly bow at the front, navel height. It's a wonder, really, that we didn't wear shoes in bed.” Which author, who died this year, recalling his childhood?

    1. Ira Levin

    2. Arthur Miller

    3. Simon Gray

    4. Rabbi Lionel Blue

Solutions

1:B, 2:C, 3:A, 4:C, 5:B, 6:B, 7:B, 8:C, 9:A, 10:B, 11:A, 12:C, 13:D, 14:B, 15:C, 16:A, 17:D, 18:B, 19:C, 20:D, 21:D, 22:B, 23:A, 24:C, 25:A, 26:D, 27:A, 28:A, 29:B, 30:D, 31:C, 32:B, 33:C

Scores

1. 5 and above.

   Oh really! Have you ever visited this website before?

2. 10 and above.

   You probably hadn't gathered this, but they're still publishing new books - you really should go check them out

3. 15 and above.

   Not entirely bad. You've clearly read a few books. Just not very many

4. 20 and above.

   On the brink of good. Read this site more often next year and you'll be even better informed

5. 25 and above.

   Pretty good. In all honesty this is probably the best result to have. Get any more right and you'd be open to accusations of a shallow fixation on the new.

6. 30 and above.

   Very good indeed. You're clearly a regular reader of this site, and for that we love you desperately

7. 33 and above.

   Wow. You're frighteningly well informed. I bet people are too scared to talk to you at parties. (Not us, of course)