1. George Orwell, reviewing one of the shortlisted winners, complained that the author “appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned.” But which one?

   1. Aldous Huxley

   2. Graham Greene

   3. LP Hartley

   4. Alan Hollinghurst

2. A search through the archives of the author's south London school recently revealed a cache of teenage poetry, including "Sacrifice to the Minotaur" (“She hastens to the island, far away/ Where towers and mountain-tops are stained with day/ And the voice of the Minotaur is drearily crying”). But who is the James Tait Black prizewinning mythologiser?

   1. William Golding

   2. Zadie Smith

   3. Angela Carter

   4. Robert Graves

3. "I like purple passages in my life. I like drama. But not in my writing. I think it's bad manners to inflict a lot of emotional involvement on the reader – much nicer to make them laugh and to keep it short." A motto for which James Tait Black winning author?

   1. Jonathan Franzen

   2. Evelyn Waugh

   3. Muriel Spark

   4. Salman Rushdie

4. James Kelman won the James Tait Black prize in 1989 with A Disaffection – the story of a closet revolutionary whose life is an endless round of cheap dinners and lonely weekends, swinging from suicidal despair to grin-and-bear-it resignation. But what are the opening lines?

   1. “Electricity - Harsh service station light. Friday 13 January, 1984 - She puts a cigarette to her lips, a lighter to her cigarette.”

   2. “It happened on her way home from the casino one morning, Helen noticed the two men through the side passenger window. A pair of homeless guys. one was tall and skinny, the other smaller, heavier built and walking with a limp, quite a bad limp.”

   3. “Patrick Doyle was a teacher. Gradually he had become sickened by it. Then a very odd thing happened or was made to happen. He had been visiting the local arts centre and having a couple of drinks, found himself round the back of the premises for a pish, and discovered a pair of old pipes.”

   4. “Ye wake in a corner and stay there hoping yer body will disappear, the thoughts smothering ye; these thoughts; but ye want to remember and face up to things, just something keeps ye from doing it, why can ye no do it; the words filling yer head: then the other words; there's something wrong; there's something far far wrong; ye're no a good man, ye're just no a good man.”

5. Which prize-winning author is a fan of science as well as literature, suggesting "Both involve curiosity, taking risks, thinking in an adventurous manner, and being willing to say something 9/10ths of people will say is wrong”?

   1. John Le Carré

   2. Ian McEwan

   3. Margaret Drabble

   4. Cormac McCarthy

6. “Although I now try to avoid such gatherings, I look back at that first literary festival and remember much of it with great fondness.” But James Tait Black-winning festival old-timer is it?

   1. Caryl Phillips

   2. AS Byatt

   3. JM Coetzee

   4. Rose Tremain

Solutions

1:B, 2:C, 3:C, 4:C, 5:D, 6:A

Scores

1. 2 and above.

   Maybe you'll have to settle for best of the rest. Unless you want to try again ...

2. 4 and above.

   Not bad. But with nearly 100 years of fiction winners to choose from, have you made the right selections?

3. 6 and above.

   A prize-winning performance. Are you on the Best of the James Tait Black panel?