SSC CGL 2025 Tier-I · 19 September 2025, Shift 1 · General Awareness · Question 10 of 100

We transcribed this text from the pictures on a candidate's response sheet for this shift; the answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. Solution last reviewed 11 September 2026.

Where this paper and its answers come from

SSC does not publish CGL question papers or a public answer key. From 2025 the candidate response sheet prints every question and option as a picture, so the text here is transcribed from those pictures for this shift and checked against them independently; where the layout carries meaning, the picture is shown as well. Each answer is the key SSC colour-marked on that sheet. SSC released a tentative key for challenge and later its final one, both only to candidates behind a login, and the sheet does not say which of the two it carries. The solutions are written by UnlockIAS.

'Half the Night is Gone' is written by which Sahitya Akademi winner?

(a)Amitav Ghosh
(b)Amit Chaudhuri
(c)Anuradha Roy
(d)Amitabha Bagchi

Answer

Why

Correct — D. Half the Night Is Gone (2018) is a novel by Amitabha Bagchi, a professor of computer science at IIT Delhi.

It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019. The book is his, so the author the stem asks for is Amitabha Bagchi → option (d).

Why the others are wrong

(a)
Amitav Ghosh — Amitav Ghosh did win the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1989 for The Shadow Lines, but he did not write Half the Night Is Gone.
(b)
Amit Chaudhuri — Amit Chaudhuri won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002 for A New World. Half the Night Is Gone is Amitabha Bagchi's novel.
(c)
Anuradha Roy — Anuradha Roy won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2022 for All the Lives We Never Lived. She is not the author of this novel.

Concept

Half the Night Is Gone was published in 2018. It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019 and was also shortlisted for the JCB Prize for Literature.

Bagchi's other novels include Above Average (2007), The Householder (2012) and This Place (2013).

The stem calls the author a 'Sahitya Akademi winner', but Bagchi is not on the Akademi's own list of Sahitya Akademi Award winners. The novel's prize was the DSC Prize.

The three other names are all on that list, which is what makes them tempting. Answer from authorship.

Key facts

Half the Night Is Gone (2018) is a novel by Amitabha Bagchi.
It won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in 2019.
Sahitya Akademi Award in English: Amitav Ghosh in 1989, Amit Chaudhuri in 2002, Anuradha Roy in 2022.

Study next

The DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and its winnersSahitya Akademi Award winners in EnglishThe JCB Prize for Literature

Common traps

Trusting the stem's 'Sahitya Akademi winner' and picking a real winner: the question is settled by who wrote the book.
Confusing Amitabha Bagchi with Amitav Ghosh because the names look alike.

Here a novel is matched to its author, with prize-winners as distractors. Book and author are also tested at 17 Sep 2025, 16:00, GA Q.10, on The White Tiger and the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

Related PYQs

No directly related past PYQ was found.

Topic: Culture — all 163 SSC CGL questions on it, every solved shift.