Question 1
Which American writer stayed nearly all his life in a small town in Mississippi, which he turned into a fictional county, was briefly the local postmaster until he was sacked for reading on the job and throwing away the mail, and took Hollywood screenwriting jobs to pay his bills?
Question 2
Which Russian novelist was arrested for belonging to a circle of radicals, marched out to be shot, and reprieved only as the firing squad took aim in a deliberately staged mock execution, then sent to four years of hard labour in Siberia?
Question 3
Which Irish-born playwright and critic, a self-educated socialist, vegetarian and teetotaller who became a fixture of London letters, is the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize in Literature and an Academy Award, the latter for adapting one of his own plays?
Question 4
Which British writer, the son of Norwegian parents, was a fighter pilot in the Second World War who crash-landed in the Libyan desert, then served as an air attache and intelligence agent in Washington before turning to fiction? 
Question 5
Which English poet settled in the Lake District, first at a tiny cottage in Grasmere, composed much of his verse aloud while walking many thousands of miles over the fells, and produced a landmark 1798 collection jointly with a close friend from whom he later became estranged?
Question 6
Which American writer survived the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltering in an underground meat locker, then worked in public relations for General Electric and briefly ran a car dealership before fiction paid the bills?
Question 7
Which English writer was a hosiery merchant, brick manufacturer and secret government agent, went bankrupt more than once, was put in the pillory for a satirical pamphlet, and did not publish the novel for which he is now famous until he was almost sixty?
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