Neev Literature Festival Reading Challenge Quiz

What Does Reading and Quizzing Have in Common? Both begin with curiosity.

At the Neev Literature Festival, a flagship event of Neev Academy in Bengaluru, more than 600 teams of students read 30 books together, and four of them meet on stage to prove how closely they read.

QShala has run the quiz at the heart of the Reading Challenge for four years.

The challenge: 30 books, three months.

The Neev Literature Festival hosts a Reading Challenge every year. Teams of students read 30 curated books over three months. The list mixes stories, worlds and voices, so each team spends the term exploring ideas it might never have picked up alone. Reading becomes something to do together, with teammates swapping favourites, arguing over endings and noticing what the others missed.

The quiz: from 600+ teams to four

QShala designs and hosts the quiz that tests the teams on the books. Across the rounds, more than 600 teams take part. Four make it to the final, which is played live on festival day in front of an audience.

Inside the final

The final is built to be as much fun to watch as to play. The rounds and formats change every year, as QShala brings new names and fresh ideas each time.

Past finals have included:

• A taboo round, where teams describe characters and ideas from the books without using the obvious words.
• A rapid-fire round, where quick recall wins the points.
• A crossword where every answer is a book from the challenge.
• Wordsmash: where the answers to two questions make one word, which represents an idea in one of the books.

Authors play along. They read out some of the questions on screen, so students hear about their favourite books from the people who wrote them.

Why reading and quizzing fit together

A good quiz rewards the same habits as a good reader: paying attention, remembering the small details, connecting one idea to another and enjoying the hunt for an answer. By pairing a long reading project with a short, live quiz, the festival gives students a reason to read closely and a stage on which that effort shows.

Bring a reading quiz to your school

QShala builds quizzes around books, authors and themes for schools and literature festivals. Write to us with your idea and we will shape it with you.