1968 in literature

Events

January 1 – Cecil Day-Lewis is announced as the new Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

March 28 – Glidrose Publications releases the James Bond novel, Colonel Sun by "Robert Markham" (a pseudonym for Kingsley Amis). Initially intended as a relaunch of the Bond book series following the death in 1964 of the character's creator, Ian Fleming, Colonel Sun instead ends up being the final book of the series (discounting a "biography" of Bond and a pair of film script adaptations) until John Gardner revives the literary James Bond in 1981.

April – The United States edition of Andrew Garve's thriller The Long Short Cut becomes the first book printed completely using electronic composition.

May – The Action Theater in Munich is disbanded after its theater is wrecked by one of its founders, jealous of director Rainer Werner Fassbinder's growing power within the group.

June 17 – Tom Stoppard's parody The Real Inspector Hound opens at the Criterion Theatre in London's West End, starring Richard Briers and Ronnie Barker.

July 28 – Last Exit to Brooklyn is cleared of obscenity in the English appeal court; John Mortimer appears for the defence.

August – Tom Wolfe's books The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Pump House Gang are published on the same day. Both go on to become best-sellers and cement Wolfe's status as one of the generation's leading social critics, chroniclers of the counterculture of the 1960s and practitioners of New Journalism.

September 26 – Theatres Act 1968 ends censorship of the theatre in the United Kingdom.

October – Colin Spencer's comedy Spitting Image, one of the first plays with openly gay male leads, premières in London

October 31 – Alan Bennett's first stage play, Forty Years On, opens at the Apollo Theatre in London's West End, under the direction of Patrick Garland and starring Sir John Gielgud, Paul Eddington and the playwright.

Dean R. Koontz's first novel, Star Quest, is published by Ace Books in the United States.

N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn is published, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 and initiating the Native American Renaissance.

The Arvon Foundation is established by young poets John Fairfax and John Moat in the UK to promote creative writing.

Fiction

Lloyd Alexander – The High King

Isaac Asimov – Asimov's Mysteries

James Blish – Black Easter

Nelson Bond – Nightmares and Daydreams

Elizabeth Bowen – Eva Trout

Richard Brautigan – In Watermelon Sugar

John Brunner

Not Before Time

Stand on Zanzibar

Anthony Burgess – Enderby Outside

Martin Caidin – The God Machine

Taylor Caldwell – Testimony of Two Men

John Christopher – The Pool of Fire

John Dickson Carr

Dark of the Moon

Papa La-Bas

Agatha Christie – By the Pricking of My Thumbs

Arthur C. Clarke – 2001: A Space Odyssey

L. Sprague de Camp

The Goblin Tower

The Tritonian Ring

With Lin Carter – Conan of the Isles

August Derleth

The Adventure of the Unique Dickensians

Mr. Fairlie's Final Journey

A Praed Street Dossier

Wisconsin Murders

Philip K. Dick – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Allen Drury – Preserve and Protect

Lawrence Durrell – Tunc

Arthur Hailey – Airport

Michael Harrison – The Exploits of Chevalier Dupin

Georgette Heyer – Cousin Kate

Barry Hines – A Kestrel for a Knave

Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp

Conan the Freebooter

With Lin Carter – Conan the Wanderer

With Björn Nyberg – Conan the Avenger

John Irving – Setting Free the Bears

Dorothy M. Johnson – Indian Country

James Jones – The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories

Halldór Laxness – Kristnihald undir jökli

John le Carré – A Small Town in Germany

John D. MacDonald

Pale Gray for Guilt

The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper

Norman Mailer – Armies of the Night

Robert Markham – Colonel Sun

Patrick Modiano – La Place de l'étoile

N. Scott Momaday – House Made of Dawn

Brian Moore – I Am Mary Dunne

Alice Munro – Dance of the Happy Shades (short stories)

Andrew Osmond and Douglas Hurd – Send Him Victorious

Anthony Powell – The Military Philosophers

Jean Rhys – Tigers Are Better-Looking

Mordecai Richler – Cocksure

Giorgio Scerbanenco – I ragazzi del massacro

Rudi Šeligo – Triptih Agate Schwarzkobler

Robert Silverberg – The Masks of Time

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Cancer Ward

The First Circle

Muriel Spark – The Public Image

Angus John Mackintosh Stewart – Sandel

Sri Lal Sukla – Raag Darbari

John Updike – Couples

Jack Vance – City of the Chasch

Tarjei Vesaas – The Boat in the Evening

Gore Vidal – Myra Breckinridge

Christa Wolf – The Quest for Christa T. (Nachdenken über Christa T.)

John Wyndham – Chocky

Children and young people

Joan Aiken – The Whispering Mountain

Elisabeth Beresford – The Wombles (first in the Wombles series of six titles)

Don Freeman – Corduroy

Clement Freud (with Frank Francis) – Grimble

John Grant – Littlenose (first in the Littlenose series of 15 books)

Rosemary Harris – The Moon in the Cloud

Russell Hoban – The Mouse and His Child

Ted Hughes – The Iron Man

Judith Kerr – The Tiger Who Came to Tea

Alexander Key – Escape to Witch Mountain

Ursula Le Guin – A Wizard of Earthsea (first in the Earthsea series)

Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Book of Mermaids

David McKee – Elmer the Patchwork Elephant

Robert C. O'Brien – The Silver Crown

Seymour Simon – The Look-it-up Book of the Earth (non-fiction)

Jill Tomlinson – The Owl Who Was Afraid of the Dark

Paul Zindel – The Pigman (first in The Pigman trilogy)

Drama

Alan Bennett – Forty Years On

Hugo Claus – Vrijdag (Friday)

Mart Crowley – The Boys in the Band

Thomas Kilroy – The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche

Colin Spencer – Spitting Image

Tom Stoppard – The Real Inspector Hound

Shūji Terayama (寺山 修司) – Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (書を捨てよ町へ出よう, Sho o Suteyo, Machi e Deyō)

Michel Tremblay – Les Belles-Sœurs

Poetry

Rod McKuen – Lonesome Cities

George Oppen – Of Being Numerous

Non-fiction

L. Sprague de Camp

The Conan Reader

The Great Monkey Trial

With Catherine Crook de Camp – The Day of the Dinosaur

Carlos Castaneda – The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

Eldridge Cleaver – Soul On Ice

Paul R. Ehrlich – The Population Bomb

Esther Hautzig – The Endless Steppe (autobiography)

H. P. Lovecraft – Selected Letters II (1925–1929)

William Manchester – The Arms of Krupp: 1597-1968

James Morris – Pax Britannica: The Climax of Empire

Charles Rembar – The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill

Adam Smith – The Money Game

Erich von Däniken – Chariots of the Gods? (Erinnerungen an die Zukunft)

James D. Watson – The Double Helix

Births

January 30 – Rhoda Shipman, American comic book writer

March 23 – Mitch Cullin, American novelist

May 27 – Ekow Eshun, British Ghanaian writer, journalist and broadcaster

July 6 – Tiit Aleksejev, Estonian novelist and playwright

September 14 – Shuichi Yoshida (吉田修), Japanese novelist

December 6 – Karl Ove Knausgård, Norwegian autobiographical novelist

December 31 – Junot Díaz, Dominican American novelist

Unknown date – K. V. Johansen, Canadian children's author

Deaths

January 1 – Donagh MacDonagh, Irish poet, playwright and judge (born 1912)

January 14 – Dorothea Mackellar, Australian poet (born 1885)

February 23 – Fannie Hurst, American novelist (born 1889)

April 16 – Edna Ferber, American novelist, short story writer and playwright (born 1885)

April 25 – Donald Davidson, American poet (born 1893)

May 1 – Sir Harold Nicolson, British biographer (born 1886)

May 30

Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor, Romanian anthropologist, ethnographer and children's writer (born 1900)

Martin Noth, German Hebraist (born 1902)

June 1 – Helen Keller, deaf-blind American author, activist and lecturer (born 1880)

September 29 – Sixto Pondal Ríos, Argentine screenwriter, poet and dramatist (born 1907)

October 30 – Conrad Richter, American novelist (born 1890)

November 17 – Mervyn Peake, English novelist (dementia, born 1911)

November 25 – Upton Sinclair, American novelist and politician (born 1878)

December 5 – Anna Kavan, British novelist, short story writer and painter (born 1901)

December 10 – Tian Han, Chinese dramatist (born 1898)

December 20 – John Steinbeck, American novelist (congestive heart failure, born 1902)

December 24 – D. Gwenallt Jones, Welsh poet (born 1899)

Awards

Nobel Prize for Literature: Yasunari Kawabata

Canada

See 1968 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

France

Prix Goncourt: Bernard Clavel, Les fruits de l'hiver

Prix Médicis: Élie Wiesel, Le Mendiant de Jérusalem

United Kingdom

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Rosemary Harris, The Moon in the Cloud

Cholmondeley Award: Harold Massingham, Edwin Morgan

Eric Gregory Award: James Aitchison, Douglas Dunn, Brian Jones

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Maggie Ross, The Gasteropod

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Gordon Haight, George Eliot

Newdigate prize: James Fenton

Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: Robert Graves

United States

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry, W. H. Auden

Hugo Award: Roger Zelazny, Lord of Light

Nebula Award: Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage

Newbery Medal for children's literature: E. L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Anthony Hecht, The Hard Hours

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Anthony Hecht, Mijn moeder

Elsewhere

Miles Franklin Award: Thomas Keneally, Three Cheers for the Paraclete

Premio Nadal: Álvaro Cunqueiro, El hombre que se parecía a Orestes

Viareggio Prize: Libero Bigiaretti, La controfigura