Women’s History Month
At every Secret Book Swap, we include a book themed parlour game and for March, we tied it into Women’s History Month.
We challenged everyone to match women from history with their achievements. Everyone enjoyed it, partly because we all learnt about amazing women we hadn’t heard of before as well as some new facts about women we were familiar with.
So now we wanted to share the same challenge here with you.
Match the woman with the achievement in the interactive game below and see how you get on.
Underneath you can also expand the hidden text to read through all the answers in more detail.
Enjoy!
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Click the + to expand and read about each woman’s achievement.
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She is the earliest known author in history whose name is recorded. Her Sumerian hymns make her the first identifiable writer, male or female
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She was a Japanese novelist, poet, and lady-in-waiting at the imperial court and wrote what is often considered the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji.
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She was an English playwright, poet, novelist, and spy, widely recognized as the first Englishwoman to earn her living through writing.
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An English novelist, essayist, and editor best known as the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , considered the first science fiction novel ever written.
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She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature awarded for her book The Age of Innocence which offered a critique of New York high society in the 1870s.
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She became a Dame this year, she was already known informally by another regal title, the Queen of Crime, having earned this as the world's best-selling fiction writer and often cited as the most popular author of all time alongside Shakespeare and the Bible—throughout the mid-to-late 20th century and named the most translated author in the world by the Guinness World Records.
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62 years after the first white woman won it, she was the first black woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. This was awarded for her book, The Color Purple, a story about a young African-American girl enduring brutal abuse, poverty, and racism in the early 1900s.
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She is a Scottish author who, in this year, published the first in a seven part series of young adult magical fantasy books, launching one of the most successful literary series in history.
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She is an activist, author, and the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She became a global symbol of girls’ right to education after surviving a 2012 assassination attempt by the Taliban and has since advocated worldwide for equal schooling opportunities. This was the year she published her first book, one that bears her name in the title.
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She might not be best known for her writing but she is an author herself. This was the year she started a book club, reshaping modern publishing and book sales. Several books from the book club have also been turned into major movies including Where the Crawdads Sing and currently in the works, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
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She launched the indie book festival, Literary Escape Festival, in Edinburgh which has now gone UK wide, with hundreds of readers coming along to events from Dundee, Stirling and Glasgow to London, Bath and Liverpool to support independent authors and small businesses.