1. “With so many trees in the city, you could see the spring coming each day until a night of warm wind would bring it suddenly in one morning." Which city was Ernest Hemingway describing?

   1. Bristol

   2. Vancouver

   3. Singapore

   4. Paris

2. 

   "I love your criminal alleyways / Your dagger-like moon upon the hills,” wrote the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Which city was he describing?

   1. Valparaíso

   2. Bogotá

   3. Santiago

   4. Medellín

3. On clear days, in which city can you see "beyond some low houses and walls of tufa and patches of thick vegetation, a blue mountain with one low peak and one a little higher", according to a famous pseudonymous novelist?

   1. Rome

   2. Naples

   3. Athens

   4. Palermo

4. In a memoir, the winner of the 2006 Nobel prize in literature described his home town as follows: "For the more sensitive and attuned residents, these ruins are reminders that the present city is so poor and confused that it can never again dream of rising to the same heights of wealth, power and culture." Name the city.

   1. Damascus

   2. Istanbul

   3. Athens

   4. Rome

5. Which city is the subject of this quote from a famous US playwright? "In this part of [town] you are practically always just around the corner, or a few doors down the street, from a tinny piano being played …"

   1. San Francisco

   2. New Orleans

   3. New York City

   4. Atlanta

6. 

   "Ungentrified, ungentrifiable. Boom and bust never came here. Here bust is permanent …" Which celebrated contemporary author described an area of London in those words?

   1. Andrea Levy

   2. Hanif Kureishi

   3. Zadie Smith

   4. Martin Amis

7. “Lost and beaten and full of emptiness”, “a neon-lighted slum” and a place “with no more personality than a paper cup”. But which town is this famous private eye – who admits he'll “take the big, sordid, dirty, crooked city” every time – talking about?

   1. Los Angeles

   2. Chicago

   3. New York

   4. Boston

8. Which North American city does Margaret Atwood describe as "New York without the garbage and muggings"?

   1. Chicago

   2. Toronto

   3. Vancouver

   4. Seattle

9. 

   Which city was described by Charles Dickens as a place where "the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh" and by George Orwell "as a gathering-place for eccentric people, people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent"?

   1. London

   2. Madrid

   3. Barcelona

   4. Paris

10. "The giant digital screens fastened to the sides of buildings fall silent as midnight approaches, but loudspeakers on storefronts keep pumping out exaggerated hip-hop bass lines. A large game centre crammed with young people; wild electronic sounds; a group of college students spilling out from a bar ... dark-suited men racing across diagonal crosswalks for the last trains to the suburbs ..." Which city is full of late-night energy?

    1. Las Vegas

    2. New York City

    3. Tokyo

    4. Berlin

11. Which war-torn city did Khaled Hosseini describe as follows in his 2013 bestseller? "... the shell-blasted schools, the squatters living in roofless buildings, the beggars, the mud, the fickle electricity, but it's like describing music. He cannot bring it to life. [The city's] vivid, arresting details – the bodybuilding gym amid the rubble, for instance, a painting of Schwarzenegger on the window."

    1. Aleppo

    2. Mosul

    3. Gaza

    4. Kabul

12. 

    Which city – built to "cut a window into Europe", according to Aleksandr Pushkin – did a seminal novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky describe as "a city of half-crazy people ... there are few places where you'll find so many gloomy, harsh and strange influences on the soul of a man"?

    1. Moscow

    2. St Petersburg

    3. Vienna

    4. Kiev

13. Where are the characters of an Irvine Welsh novel when they "go fir a pish in the auld Central Station at the Fit ay the Walk, now a barren, desolate hangar, which is soon tae be demolished and replaced by a supermarket and swimming centre"?

    1. Glasgow

    2. Leith

    3. Aberdeen

    4. Dundee

14. Which city is this poem about? "We make brilliant music. We make brilliant bands / We make goals that make souls leap from seats in the stands / And we make things from steel and we make things from cotton / And we make people laugh, take the mick summat rotten."

    1. Manchester

    2. Newcastle

    3. Liverpool

    4. Sheffield

Solutions

1:D - From his memoir A Moveable Feast. Hemingway's travels are deeply embedded in his most famous works – from The Sun Also Rises, set in Pamplona, to The Old Man and the Sea, written in Havana – but he is most associated with the French capital, 2:A - Taken from Neruda's Canto General. The poet had a house in Valparaíso, named La Sebastiana, and wrote that if "we walk up and down all the stairs of Valparaíso we’ll have walked all round the world", 3:B - The passage is from My Brilliant Friend, the first of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels. The city itself is almost like a character in her books, 4:B - The passage is from Istanbul: Memories and the City by Orhan Pamuk, 5:B - Here, Tennessee Williams sets the scene for his 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire, 6:C - The passage is about Kilburn, from Zadie Smith's 2012 novel NW, which traces the lives of four characters who grew up in the same part of north-west London, 7:A - Home of Raymond Chandler's famous gumshoe detective Philip Marlowe, 8:B - From her 1988 novel Cat's Eye. The influential Canadian writer has more than 40 books of poetry, fiction and essays to her name, 9:D - Taken from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities and Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London, 10:C - Haruki Murakami's 2004 novel After Dark is set in Tokyo's nocturnal downtown entertainment district, Shinjuku, 11:D - From And the Mountains Echoed, a 2013 novel by the Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, 12:B - Pushkin's narrative poem The Bronze Horseman is about the statue of Peter the Great that stands in Senate Square. Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is about an ex-student in the city., 13:B - Welsh’s Trainspotting was first published in 1993. It follows a group of friends and heroin users in the 1980s living in Leith, a deprived district in the north of Edinburgh on the cusp of regeneration, 14:A - From This Is the Place, by local poet Tony Walsh (AKA Longfella). He performed the poem, dedicated to the city, at the vigil for the victims of the Manchester Arena attack in May 2017

Scores

1. 13 and above.

   Excellent

2. 14 and above.

   Excellent!

3. 12 and above.

   Well done

4. 11 and above.

   Well done

5. 10 and above.

   Well done

6. 9 and above.

   Well done

7. 8 and above.

   OK

8. 7 and above.

   OK

9. 6 and above.

   Not great

10. 5 and above.

    Poor

11. 4 and above.

    Poor

12. 3 and above.

    Hmmm

13. 2 and above.

    Hmmm

14. 1 and above.

    Oh dear

15. 0 and above.

    Oh dear