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50 free Rudyard Kipling trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Rudyard Kipling trivia for readers who grew up on Mowgli and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, English literature students, and anyone who has recited If without knowing it was written about a failed South African raid. This quiz follows Kipling from his birth in Bombay and the miserable years in Southsea he called the House of Desolation, through his newspaper apprenticeship in Lahore, to London fame with Barrack-Room Ballads and the strange Vermont interlude in which he wrote the Jungle Books. It covers the major works, Kim and the Great Game, the Just So Stories told to his daughter Josephine, Captains Courageous, The Man Who Would Be King, Gunga Din and Mandalay, plus the Nobel Prize he won at 41, the honours he refused, the death of his son John at Loos and the phrases he chose for the war graves and the Cenotaph. It ends at Bateman's in Sussex and Poets' Corner. Questions range from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. If you enjoy this quiz, try our Jungle Book, Victorian literature and Nobel laureates quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Rudyard Kipling born in 1865?
Bombay
His father, John Lockwood Kipling, taught architectural sculpture at the newly founded Sir J. J. School of Art there.
Q 02Kipling's unusual first name came from a lake in which English county, where his parents had courted?
Staffordshire
Rudyard Lake near Leek is a reservoir built in the 1790s to feed the Caldon Canal.
Q 03Which three-time British prime minister was Kipling's first cousin?
Stanley Baldwin
Their mothers were two of the four celebrated MacDonald sisters; another married the painter Edward Burne-Jones.
Q 04What did Kipling call the Southsea lodgings where he and his sister were left for six years as children?
The House of Desolation
He blamed Mrs Holloway's cruelty for teaching him to lie, which he called 'the foundation of literary effort'.
Q 05Kipling's schooldays at the United Services College in Devon inspired which story collection?
Stalky & Co.
He reportedly went into spasms of laughter reading his own jokes from it aloud to the family.
Q 06At sixteen Kipling returned to India to work as assistant editor of which newspaper?
The Civil and Military Gazette
He called it his 'mistress and most true love'; his father was curator of the Lahore Museum.
Q 07What was Kipling's first prose collection, published in Calcutta in January 1888?
Plain Tales from the Hills
Thirty-nine of its stories had first appeared in the Gazette; he sold the rights for just 50 pounds.
Q 08Which American author quipped of Kipling, 'he covers all that can be known and I cover the rest'?
Mark Twain
Twain's advice was to 'get your facts first and then you can distort 'em as much as you please'.
Q 09Which novelist gave away the bride at Kipling's 1892 wedding to Carrie Balestier?
Henry James
The wedding took place in a London flu epidemic so bad that 'the undertakers had run out of black horses'.
Q 10In which US state did Kipling live from 1892 to 1896, writing the Jungle Books there?
Vermont
His house, Naulakha, near Brattleboro, is now a National Historic Landmark you can rent from the Landmark Trust.
Q 11Kipling named his New England house Naulakha after what?
A Mughal pavilion and the novel he wrote with Wolcott Balestier
He had misspelt the novel's title as The Naulahka; this time, he noted, the name was spelt correctly.
Q 12Which family quarrel helped drive the Kiplings out of New England in 1896?
Brother-in-law Beatty Balestier threatening him in the street
Beatty was arrested, but the resulting publicity destroyed Kipling's cherished privacy.
Q 13The Jungle Book stories are set around which place in what is now Madhya Pradesh?
Q 21The poem 'If—' was written as a tribute to which leader of a failed 1895-96 raid on the Boer republic?
Leander Starr Jameson
Kipling revealed the inspiration in his posthumous memoir Something of Myself.
Q 22Two lines of 'If—' about 'Triumph and Disaster' are inscribed above the players' entrance at which venue?
Wimbledon's Centre Court
The poem topped a 1996 BBC poll as Britain's favourite, with twice the votes of the runner-up.
Q 23'If—' first appeared in which 1910 collection of stories and poems?
Rewards and Fairies
Seeonee
Kipling wrote them in a seven-by-eight-foot workroom with snow up to the windowsill.
Q 14What kind of animal is Baloo, Mowgli's teacher in The Jungle Book?
A bear
Bagheera is the panther, Kaa the python and Shere Khan the tiger.
Q 15Which Jungle Book hero is a mongoose who battles the cobras Nag and Nagaina?
Rikki-Tikki-Tavi
Kipling was probably inspired by a mongoose-and-snake tale in the ancient Indian Panchatantra.
Q 16The Cub Scout leader title Akela comes from which Jungle Book character?
The head of the Seeonee pack
Cubs also play 'Kim's Game', the memory exercise from Kipling's novel.
Q 17Kipling's novel Kim popularised which phrase for the Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia?
The Great Game
Kim, an orphaned Irish soldier's son, is recruited as a spy while accompanying a Tibetan lama.
Q 18In Kim, the boy hero befriends an aged lama searching for what?
The River of the Arrow
The lama hopes to free himself from the Wheel of Things; the novel treats Tibetan Buddhism sympathetically.
Q 19Kipling began the Just So Stories as bedtime tales for which daughter, who died of pneumonia in 1899?
Josephine
He called her Effie; the narrator addresses 'O my Best Beloved' throughout, and Kipling drew the illustrations himself.
Q 20In the Just So Stories, why does the Whale have such a tiny throat?
It swallowed a mariner who tied a raft inside it
Nine of the thirteen stories explain how animals got their features, from the leopard's spots to the camel's hump.
It followed the story 'Brother Square-Toes' and was framed as advice to Kipling's son John.
Q 24Gunga Din, of the famous line 'You're a better man than I am', works as what in the British Indian army?
A water-carrier
The regimental bhishti saves the wounded narrator's life and is shot dead for his trouble.
Q 25'Mandalay', 'Gunga Din' and 'Danny Deever' were collected in which 1892 volume?
Barrack-Room Ballads
Most of the poems had first appeared individually in 1890.
Q 26The poem 'Mandalay' is set in which colony, then part of British India?
Burma
Its 'old Moulmein pagoda' is in modern Mawlamyine; Frank Sinatra later sang a version the Kipling family disliked.
Q 27In 'The Man Who Would Be King', Daniel Dravot and Peachey Carnehan set out to rule which remote region?
Kafiristan
Freemasonry is a key plot device; Sean Connery and Michael Caine played the pair in John Huston's 1975 film.
Q 28Kipling's Captains Courageous follows a rich boy rescued by a schooner off which grounds?
The Grand Banks of Newfoundland
Harvey Cheyne Jr. spends a season aboard the We're Here; Spencer Tracy won an Oscar in the 1937 film.
Q 29In which year did Kipling become the first English-language Nobel literature laureate?
1907
At 41 he remains the youngest literature laureate ever.
Q 30Which two British honours did Kipling turn down?
The Poet Laureateship and a knighthood
He was sounded out for the Laureateship and, several times, for a knighthood, and declined both.