1963 in literature

Events

January 2 – Traverse Theatre opens in Edinburgh.

February 11 – American-born poet Sylvia Plath (age 30) commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her London flat during the cold winter of 1962–63 in the United Kingdom about a month after publication of her only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar and six days after writing her last poem, "Edge".

March – Publications and Entertainments Act in South Africa enables the government to impose strict censorship there. Des Troye's novel An Act of Immorality (an attack on the miscegenation provisions of the country's Immorality Act) is among the first works to be prohibited under it.

March 19 – Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop premières the ensemble musical play Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London.

May 17 – First Galician Literature Day.

July 16 – A day after being admitted to the Acland Hospital in Oxford, C. S. Lewis suffers a heart attack; although later discharged, he dies four months later, at home in Oxford.

August 20 – The Royal Shakespeare Company introduces its performance cycle of Shakespeare's history plays under the title The War of the Roses, adapted and directed by John Barton and Peter Hall, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

October 21 – Release of the first film from Merchant Ivory Productions, The Householder with screenplay adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel.

October 22 – The National Theatre Company in the United Kingdom, newly formed under artistic director Laurence Olivier, gives its first performance, with Peter O'Toole as Hamlet, in London.

November 17 – Fictional hero 8 Man, created by science fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai and manga artist Jiro Kuwata, appears in print for the first time.

Novy Mir publishes three further short stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn critical of the Soviet regime, including "Matryona's Home"; they will be the last of his works to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990.

First modern publication by mainstream publishers in both Britain and the United States of John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748-9). The book is banned for obscenity in Massachusetts, triggering a court case by its publisher, and a London retailer is prosecuted.

Leslie Charteris publishes his final collection of stories featuring Simon Templar, also known as "The Saint", The Saint in the Sun (he first wrote about the character in 1928). After this, all future Saint books will be ghost-written by other authors, though Charteris will continue in an editorial capacity until the series ends in 1983.

Grace Ogot's short story "A Year of Sacrifice" (later retitled "The Rains Came") is published in Black Orpheus.

English novelist Anthony Burgess begins an affair with Italian translator Liana Johnson.

Fiction

J. G. Ballard

The Four-Dimensional Nightmare

Passport to Eternity

Simone de Beauvoir – Force of Circumstance (La Force des choses)

Thomas Bernhard – Frost

Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes)

Pearl S. Buck – The Living Reed

Anthony Burgess – Inside Mr. Enderby

Dino Buzzati – A Love Affair

Taylor Caldwell – Grandmother and the Priests

Morley Callaghan – That Summer in Paris

John Dickson Carr – The Men Who Explained Miracles

Agatha Christie – The Clocks

Julio Cortázar – Hopscotch (Rayuela)

Oskar Davičo

Ćutnje (Silences)

Gladi (Hungers)

L. Sprague de Camp – A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales

L. Sprague de Camp (as editor) – Swords and Sorcery

Len Deighton – Horse Under Water

August Derleth (as Stephen Grendon) – Mr. George and Other Odd Persons

J.P. Donleavy – A Singular Man

Daphne du Maurier – The Glass-Blowers

Nell Dunn – Up the Junction

John Fowles – The Collector

Ian Fleming

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

Thrilling Cities

Jane Gaskell – The Serpent

Günter Grass – Dog Years – (Hundejahre)

John Hawkes – Second Skin

Georgette Heyer – False Colours

Ismail Kadare – The General of the Dead Army (Gjenerali i Ushtrisë së vdekur)

Damon Knight – First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time

John le Carré – The Spy who Came in from the Cold

J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation)

Primo Levi – La tregua (The Truce, Reawakening)

Mary McCarthy – The Group

John McGahern – The Barracks

Richard McKenna – The Sand Pebbles

Alistair MacLean – Ice Station Zebra

James A. Michener – Caravans

Spike Milligan – Puckoon

Emily Cheney Neville – It's Like This, Cat

John O'Hara – Elizabeth Appleton

Marcel Pagnol

The Water of the Hills (L'Eau des collines)

Jean de Florette

Manon des Sources

Živojin Pavlović – Krivudava reka (Curved River, short stories)

Sylvia Plath (as Victoria Lucas) – The Bell Jar

Laurens van der Post – The Seed and the Sower

Thomas Pynchon – V.

John Rechy – City of Night

Susan Sontag – Benefactor

Muriel Spark – The Girls of Slender Means

Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) – The Man With the Getaway Face

Rex Stout – The Mother Hunt

Erwin Strittmatter – Ole Bienkopp

Boris and Arkady Strugatsky – Dalyokaya Raduga

Walter Tevis – The Man Who Fell to Earth

Jim Thompson – The Grifters

Rosemary Tonks – Opium Fogs

Mario Vargas Llosa – The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros)

Jack Vance – The Dragon Masters

Tarjei Vesaas – Is-slottet (The Ice Palace)

Kurt Vonnegut – Cat's Cradle

Keith Waterhouse – Billy Liar

Charles Webb – The Graduate

David Weiss – Naked Came I

Manly Wade Wellman – Who Fears the Devil?

Morris West – The Shoes of the Fisherman

Christa Wolf – Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel)

Children and young people

Nina Bawden – The Secret Passage

Hester Burton – Time of Trial

Paul Gallico – The Day the Guinea-Pig Talked

Rumer Godden – Little Plum

Edward Gorey – The Gashlycrumb Tinies

Ted Hughes – How the Whale Became

Norton Juster – The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Clive King – Stig of the Dump

Madeleine L'Engle – A Wrinkle in Time

Sterling North – Rascal

Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Book of Giants

Charles M. Schulz – Happiness Is a Warm Puppy

Maurice Sendak – Where the Wild Things Are

Donald J. Sobol – Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (first in a series of 29 books)

Rosemary Sutcliff – Sword at Sunset

Colin Thiele – Storm Boy

Bill Peet – The Pinkish, Purplish, Bluish Egg

Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky – The Cow Went Over The Mountain

Drama

Alan Ayckbourn – Mr. Whatnot

John Barton and Peter Hall (adapted from Shakespeare) – The War of the Roses

Samuel Beckett – Play (premiered in German as Spiel)

Emilio Carballido – ¡Silencio Pollos pelones, ya les van a echar su maíz!

Václav Havel – The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost)

Rolf Hochhuth – The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel)

John Mortimer – A Voyage Round My Father (original radio version)

Bill Naughton

Alfie

All in Good Time

Barry Reckord – Skyvers

Theatre Workshop – Oh, What a Lovely War!

Poetry

T. S. Eliot – Collected Poems 1909–1962 (selected by author, published on 75th birthday)

Lionel Kearns – Songs of Circumstance

H. P. Lovecraft – Collected Poems

Non-fiction

James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time

Thomas B. Costain – William the Conqueror

L. Sprague de Camp – The Ancient Engineers

Milovan Đilas – Montenegro

Richard P. Feynman – Six Easy Pieces

Shelby Foote – The Civil War: A Narrative – Vol 2: Fredicksburg to Meridian

Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique

Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail

H. P. Lovecraft – Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity

William H. McNeill – The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community

Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death

Margaret Murray – My First Hundred Years (autobiography)

E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class

UNESCO – History of Mankind – Vol 1

Births

January 11 – Jan Arnald (Arne Dahl), Swedish novelist and critic

January 18 – Peter Stamm, Swiss writer, dramatist and journalist

January 30 – Thomas Brezina, Austrian author

March 26 – Natsuhiko Kyogoku (京極 夏彦), Japanese mystery writer

April 27 – Russell T. Davies, Welsh television writer

May 5 – Scott Westerfeld, American young-adult novelist

May 8 – Robin Jarvis, English novelist

May 24 – Michael Chabon, American author

June 25 – Yann Martel, Canadian author

August 15 – Jan Sonnergaard, Danish short-story writer (died 2016)

September 4 – Louise Doughty, English novelist and radio dramatist

September 6 – Alice Sebold, American novelist

October 25 – Dominic Dromgoole, English theatre director and writer

December 23 – Donna Tartt, American novelist

Unknown dates

Jeff Abbott, American genre novelist

Joanna Briscoe, English novelist

Don Paterson, Scottish poet, writer and musician

Michael Symmons Roberts, English poet

Deaths

January 8 – Kay Sage, American poet (suicide, born 1898)

January 14 – Gustav Regler, German Socialist novelist (born 1898)

January 29 – Robert Frost, American poet (born 1874)

February 4 – Brinsley MacNamara (John Weldon), Irish novelist and playwright (born 1890)

February 11 – Sylvia Plath, American-born poet and novelist (suicide, born 1932)

February 24 – Herbert Asbury, American journalist and writer (born 1889)

March 4 – William Carlos Williams, American writer (born 1883)

March 11

Deirdre Cash (Criena Rohan), Australian novelist (born 1924)

James Lennox Kerr (Peter Dawlish, Gavin Douglas), Scottish novelist and children's writer (born 1899)

March 29 – Pola Gojawiczyńska, Polish writer (born 1896)

May 12 – A. W. Tozer, American religious writer and pastor (born 1897)

May 28 – Ion Agârbiceanu, Romanian writer and pastor (born 1882)

June 3 – Nâzım Hikmet Ran, Turkish poet, playwright and novelist (heart attack, born 1892)

June 17 – John Cowper Powys, English novelist (born 1872)

August 1 – Theodore Roethke, American poet (heart attack, born 1908)

August 18 – Clifford Odets, American dramatist (cancer, born 1906)

August 27 – W. E. B. Du Bois, American writer, scholar and activist (born 1868)

September 3 – Louis MacNeice, Irish poet (pneumonia, born 1907)

October 11 – Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist and short story writer (born 1889)

October – Jolán Földes, Hungarian novelist and playwright (born 1902)

November 13 – Margaret Murray, Indian-born English archeologist and historian (born 1863)

November 22

Mary Findlater, Scottish novelist (born 1866)

Aldous Huxley, English novelist (cancer, born 1894)

C. S. Lewis, Irish novelist and children's and religious writer (renal failure, born 1898)

December 25 – Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), Romanian-born French poet and essayist (born 1896)

Awards

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry: William Carlos Williams

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Hester Burton, Time of Trial

Eric Gregory Award: Ian Hamilton, Stewart Conn, Peter Griffith, David Wevill

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Gerda Charles, A Slanting Light

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations

Miles Franklin Award: Sumner Locke Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

Nobel Prize for literature – Giorgos Seferis

Premio Nadal: Manuel Mejía Vallejo, El día señalado

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: William Faulkner – The Reivers

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William Carlos Williams: Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems

Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: William Plomer

In literature

The following novels are set wholly or partly in this year:

James Clavell's Noble House (1981).

Penelope Fitzgerald's At Freddie's (1982).

Val McDermid's A Place of Execution (1999).

Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957).