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50 free Jorge Luis Borges trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Jorge Luis Borges never wrote a novel, called long books a laborious madness, and still rebuilt world fiction from a few dozen short stories about libraries, mirrors, dreamers and forking time. Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, schooled in Geneva, blind by his mid-fifties, he spent years as a municipal library assistant writing in the basement before Ficciones and El Aleph made him the bridge between modernism and everything that came after. These 50 questions walk through the life and the stories. The easy tier covers his country, his blindness, the Aleph and Funes; the middle asks about Ultraism, the journal Sur, Bioy Casares, the Harvard lectures and the Paraguayan wedding to María Kodama; the hard tier reaches for Red Scharlach, Fray Bentos, the peryton, Prisma pasted on city walls, Artur Lundkvist's Nobel objection and the 1946 English translation of The Circular Ruins. There are questions on politics too: the poultry-inspector insult under Perón, the essay Yo, Judío, and the Falklands comb. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a book club.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Borges was a short-story writer, poet and essayist from which country?
Argentina
He was born in Palermo, then a poor district of Buenos Aires, in 1899.
Q 02Which 1944 collection became Borges's most famous book and made him known worldwide?
Ficciones
It grew out of the 1941 volume The Garden of Forking Paths plus a second section called Artifices.
Q 03Borges shared the first International Formentor Prize in 1961 with which writer?
Samuel Beckett
The prize brought Borges, then largely untranslated in English, sudden international attention.
Q 04Which condition had fully overtaken Borges by the age of 55?
Blindness
His father had also lost his sight, and Borges never learned to read Braille.
Q 05In 1955 Borges was appointed director of which Argentine institution?
National Library
He got the job from the provisional government that had just toppled Perón.
Q 06Borges died of liver cancer in 1986 in which city?
Geneva
He had studied there as a teenager and dedicated his final work, The Conspirators, to the city.
Q 07In "The Library of Babel", every book in the library has how many pages?
410
The narrator's universe is an endless expanse of hexagonal rooms lined with bookshelves.
Q 08Which Borges story features a point in space that contains all other points?
The Aleph
The narrator finds it in the cellar of a mediocre poet named Carlos Argentino Daneri.
Q 09Ireneo Funes, in "Funes the Memorious", is cursed with the inability to do what?
Forget
He can reconstruct an entire past day, though doing so takes him another full day.
Q 10Which 1941 Borges story is said to foreshadow the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?
The Garden of Forking Paths
Hugh Everett's relative-state thesis, the basis of many-worlds, did not appear until 1957.
Q 11Borges wrote parody detective stories as "H. Bustos Domecq" with which collaborator?
Adolfo Bioy Casares
The pair met at Victoria Ocampo's villa in 1932 and also ran a detective-fiction imprint together.
Q 12Which honour was Borges nominated for more than thirty times without ever winning?
Nobel Prize in Literature
He joked that not giving it to him had become a Scandinavian tradition.
Q 13At age ten, Borges translated which Oscar Wilde story into Spanish?
The Happy Prince
Friends assumed the real translator was his father, a lawyer with literary ambitions.
Q 21What was the title of Borges's first poetry collection, published in 1923?
Fervor de Buenos Aires
Later in life he tried to buy up copies of some early publications to destroy them.
Q 22Borges's sister Norah made her name in which art?
Painting
Their father, who grew up speaking English at home, wrote a novel called El caudillo.
Q 23Borges delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1967-68 at which university?
Harvard
The talks were later published as This Craft of Verse.
Q 24From 1967 Borges spent five years collaborating with which American translator?
Q 14Borges's longest work of fiction, "The Congress", runs to roughly how many pages?
14
He never wrote a novel, calling it a genre that requires padding.
Q 15In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Uqbar is first sought in what kind of reference work?
An encyclopedia
The entry turns up only in one odd reprint of the Anglo-American Cyclopaedia.
Q 16In "Death and the Compass", who is detective Erik Lönnrot's criminal nemesis?
Red Scharlach
Lönnrot follows what looks like a kabbalistic pattern straight into a trap.
Q 17In "The Circular Ruins", a man arrives at a burned temple intending to do what?
Dream a man into being
He learns at the end that he too is being dreamed by someone else.
Q 18Borges's story "Emma Zunz" was filmed in 1954 under which title?
Días de odio
Leopoldo Torre Nilsson directed the adaptation, whose title means Days of Hate.
Q 19Borges recorded the 1965 album El Tango with which Argentine composer?
Astor Piazzolla
His recorded output also includes lectures on Buddhism, the Kabbalah and the Divine Comedy.
Q 20Under which president was Borges "promoted" to inspector of poultry and rabbits?
Juan Perón
Told it was because he had sided with the Allies, Borges resigned the next day.
Norman Thomas di Giovanni
Di Giovanni argued Borges's English success came from writing with several languages in mind.
Q 25Who became Borges's widow and the heir to his estate?
María Kodama
She was of Japanese and German ancestry and had met him at a lecture on Icelandic literature.
Q 26Borges's 1986 marriage was conducted by attorney in which country?
Paraguay
The workaround was common for Argentines sidestepping their country's divorce laws.
Q 27In Spain, the young Borges joined which avant-garde literary movement?
Ultraism
His first poem, "Hymn to the Sea", was written in the style of Walt Whitman.
Q 28Borges co-founded which broadsheet journal, distributed by pasting copies on walls?
Prisma
He also co-founded Proa and contributed to the avant-garde review Martín Fierro.
Q 29Which William Faulkner novel did Borges translate into Spanish in 1940?
The Wild Palms
His choice of a lesser Faulkner novel was probably driven by opportunity and the need for money.
Q 30In what year did Borges receive a British honorary knighthood?
1964
The French Legion of Honour followed in 1983.