1965 in literature

Events

March 26 – Harold Pinter's play The Homecoming is given its world première at the New Theatre, Cardiff, by the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall. Its London première is on June 3 at the Aldwych Theatre and it is first published this year. Vivien Merchant, Pinter's wife at this time, appears in it.

May 26 – World première of A High Wind in Jamaica, the film of Richard Hughes's 1929 novel, featuring future novelist Martin Amis (son of Kingsley) as a young teen actor.

June 11 – International Poetry Incarnation, a performance poetry event, is staged at the Royal Albert Hall in London before an audience of 7,000, with members of the Beat Generation featuring. Adrian Mitchell reads "To Whom It May Concern".

June 17 – London première of Frank Marcus' farce The Killing of Sister George (at the Duke of York's Theatre), one of the first mainstream British plays with lesbian characters. Beryl Reid plays the title rôle. The play previewed in April at the Bristol Old Vic.

June 19 – J. D. Salinger's novella "Hapworth 16, 1924" occupies most of the issue of The New Yorker magazine dated today; it will be the last of his works to be published before his death in 2010.

June 29 – English novelists Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard marry (his second marriage, her third) at Marylebone register office in London.

The Nebula Award is conceived by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. The first award will be made in the following year to Frank Herbert's Dune.

National Library of New Zealand formed by merger of the Alexander Turnbull Library, the National Library Service and the General Assembly Library under the National Library Act of this year.

Fiction

Lloyd Alexander – The Black Cauldron

Cécile Aubry – Belle et Sébastien

J. G. Ballard – The Drought

Ray Bradbury – The Vintage Bradbury

John Brunner

The Martian Sphinx as Keith Woodcott

The Squares of the City

Kenneth Bulmer – Land Beyond the Map

Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan and the Castaways

Guillermo Cabrera Infante – Tres Tristes Tigres

John Dickson Carr – The House at Satan's Elbow

Agatha Christie – At Bertram's Hotel

L. Sprague de Camp

The Arrows of Hercules

The Spell of Seven (ed.)

August Derleth – The Casebook of Solar Pons

Philip K. Dick - The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Margaret Drabble – The Millstone

Ian Fleming – The Man with the Golden Gun

Margaret Forster – Georgy Girl

Witold Gombrowicz – Kosmos

Graham Greene – The Comedians

Frank Herbert – Dune

Arthur Hailey – Hotel

James Leo Herlihy - Midnight Cowboy

Bohumil Hrabal – Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains)

Bel Kaufman – Up the Down Staircase

Danilo Kiš – Garden, Ashes (Bašta, pepeo)

Pierre Klossowski – Le Baphomet

Jerzy Kosinski – The Painted Bird

John le Carré – The Looking-Glass War

J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Livre des fuites

David Lodge – The British Museum Is Falling Down

H. P. Lovecraft – Dagon and Other Macabre Tales

John D. MacDonald – A Deadly Shade of Gold

Norman Mailer – An American Dream

Eric Malpass – Morning's at Seven

James A. Michener – The Source

Mudrooroo (also known as Colin Johnson) – Wild Cat Falling

Iris Murdoch – The Red and the Green

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (also known as James Ngigi) – The River Between

Peter O'Donnell – Modesty Blaise

Raymond Queneau – Les fleurs bleues

Françoise Sagan – La Chamade

Ernst von Salomon – Die schöne Wilhelmine

Muriel Spark - The Mandelbaum Gate

Vincent Starrett – The Quick and the Dead (collection)

Irving Stone – Those Who Love

Rex Stout – The Doorbell Rang

Benjamin Tammuz – חיי אליקום (Hayei Elyakum, "The Life of Elyakum")

Jack Vance – Space Opera

Erico Verissimo – O Senhor Embaixador

Arved Viirlaid – Sadu jõkke (Rain for the River)

Ion Vinea – Lunatecii ("The Lunatics", posthumous)

Stephen Vizinczey – In Praise of Older Women: the amorous recollections of András Vajda

Kurt Vonnegut – God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

Donald Wandrei – Strange Harvest

Marguerite Young – Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

Children and young people

Kir Bulychov – Девочка, с которой ничего не случится (A Girl Nothing Can Happen To, first in the Priklyuchenia Alisy series of novels and short stories)

Susan Cooper – Over Sea, Under Stone (first in the Dark is Rising sequence of five books)

Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Book of Dragons

Ruth Park – The Muddle-Headed Wombat in the Treetops

Bill Peet - Chester the Worldly Pig

Bill Peet - Kermit the Hermit

Drama

Alan Ayckbourn – Relatively Speaking (as Meet my Father)

Samuel Beckett – Come and Go

Edward Bond – Saved

David Halliwell – Little Malcolm And His Struggle Against The Eunuchs

John B. Keane – The Field

Frank Marcus – The Killing of Sister George

Sławomir Mrożek – Tango

John Osborne – A Patriot for Me

Nelson Rodrigues – Toda Nudez Será Castigada (All Nudity Shall Be Punished)

Michel Tremblay – Les Belles-Sœurs

Poetry

Stanley McNail – Something Breathing

Sylvia Plath – Ariel

Clark Ashton Smith – Poems in Prose

Non-fiction

Dean Acheson – Morning and Noon

Dmitri Borgmann – Language on Vacation

Nirad C. Chaudhuri – The Continent of Circe

Allen G. Debus – The English Paracelsians.

Richard Feynman – The Character of Physical Law

Barney Glaser & Anselm Strauss – Awareness of Dying

William Golding – The Hot Gates

Alex Haley & Malcolm X – The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Peter Laslett – The World We Have Lost: England before the Industrial Age

H. P. Lovecraft – Selected Letters I (1911–1924)

Robin Moore – The Green Berets

Births

March 4

Andrew Collins, English journalist and scriptwriter

Anisul Hoque, Bangladeshi novelist, dramatist and journalist

March 30 – Piers Morgan, English journalist and editor

June 2 – Sean Stewart, American-Canadian author

July 7 – Zoë Heller, English novelist

July 31 – J. K. Rowling, English children's novelist

August 1 – Sam Mendes, English theatre and film director

September 29 - Nikolaj Frobenius, Norwegian novelist

October 23 – Augusten Burroughs, American memoirist

November 28 – Erwin Mortier, Belgian poet, novelist and translator writing in Flemish/Dutch

December 14 – Helle Helle, Danish novelist

December 31 – Nicholas Sparks, American novelist

Unknown dates

Patience Agbabi, British performance poet

Keith Mansfield, English novelist and publisher

Deaths

January 4 – T. S. Eliot, American-born English poet and dramatist (born 1888)

January 12 – Lorraine Hansberry, American journalist and dramatist (cancer, born 1930)

March 13 – Fan S. Noli, Albanian bishop and poet (born 1882)

May 3 – Howard Spring, Welsh-born novelist and writer (born 1889)

May 5 – Edgar Mittelholzer, Guyanese-born novelist (suicide, born 1909)

May 19 – Maria Dąbrowska, Polish novelist, essayist and playwright (born 1889)

June 5

Thornton Burgess, American children's author (born 1874)

Eleanor Farjeon, English children's writer and poet (born 1881)

June 13 – Martin Buber, Austrian-born Jewish philosopher (born 1878)

July 9 – Jacques Audiberti, French Absurdist dramatist, poet and novelist (born 1899)

July 28 – Rampo Edogawa (江戸川 乱歩, Taro Hirai), Japanese author and critic (born 1894)

July 30 – Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (谷崎 潤一郎), Japanese novelist (born 1888)

July 31 – John Metcalfe, English novelist and short story writer (born 1891)

August 1 – Percy Lubbock, English essayist, critic and biographer (born 1879)

August 6 – Aksel Sandemose, Danish novelist (born 1899)

August 8 – Shirley Jackson, American horror novelist and short story writer (born 1916)

August 17 – Jack Spicer, American poet (alcohol-related, born 1925)

October 8 – Thomas B. Costain, Canadian popular historian (born 1885)

October 15 – Randall Jarrell, American poet (road accident, born 1914)

October 30 – Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., American historian (born 1888)

November 8 – Dorothy Kilgallen, American journalist (alcohol/drug overdose, born 1913)

November 20 – Katharine Anthony, American biographer (born 1877)

December 16 – W. Somerset Maugham English novelist, dramatist and short story writer (born 1874)

Unknown date – Betty Miller, Irish-born Jewish writer (born 1910)

Awards

Nobel Prize for literature – Michail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov

Canada

See 1965 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

France

Prix Goncourt: J. Borel, L'Adoration

Prix Médicis: René-Victor Pilhes, La Rhubarbe

United Kingdom

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Philip Turner, The Grange at High Force

Eric Gregory Award: John Fuller, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, Norman Talbot

Newdigate prize: Peter Jay

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Muriel Spark, The Mandelbaum Gate

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: The Later Years 1803–1850

Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: Philip Larkin

United States

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Criticism: Walter Lippmann

Hugo Award: Fritz Leiber, The Wanderer

Nebula Award: Frank Herbert, Dune

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Maia Wojciechowska, Shadow of a Bull

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Frank D. Gilroy, The Subject Was Roses

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Shirley Ann Grau – The Keepers Of The House

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: John Berryman: 77 Dream Songs

Elsewhere

Miles Franklin Award: Thea Astley, The Slow Natives

Premio Nadal: E. Cabalero Calderón, El buen salvaje

Viareggio Prize: Goffredo Parise, Il Padrone (The Boss)