Kalpana Kalpana (Editor)

1979 in literature

Updated on
Edit
Like
Comment
Share on FacebookTweet on TwitterShare on LinkedInShare on Reddit

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1979.

Contents

Events

  • April 13 – The Adventure of Sudsakorn, the only cel-animated feature film ever made in Thailand, is released to cinemas. It is based on Phra Aphai Mani, a 30,000-line epic written by Thailand's best-known poet, Sunthorn Phu.
  • May – Première of the Merchant Ivory Productions film The Europeans, with screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based on Henry James' novel The Europeans (1878).
  • October 25 – The London Review of Books is first published by founding editors Karl Miller, Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp; for its first six months it appears as an insert to The New York Review of Books.
  • K. W. Jeter's novel Morlock Night pioneers full-length fiction in the genre he will later call steampunk.
  • August Wilson's Jitney is first produced; it will become the eighth of his "Pittsburgh Cycle".
  • Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger wins the Guardian Fiction Prize.

    • Fiction

  • Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
  • V. C. Andrews – Flowers in the Attic
  • Jeffrey Archer – Kane and Abel
  • Barbara Taylor Bradford – A Woman of Substance
  • Octavia Butler – Kindred
  • Italo Calvino — If on a winter's night a traveler
  • Orson Scott Card – A Planet Called Treason
  • Angela Carter – The Bloody Chamber
  • Agatha Christie – Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories
  • L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Liberator
  • Mahmoud Dowlatabadi – Missing Soluch (Persian: جای خالی سلوچ‎‎, Ja-ye Khali-ye Soluch)
  • Michael Ende – The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte)
  • José Pablo Feinmann – Últimos días de la víctima
  • Thomas Flanagan — Year of the French
  • Alan Dean Foster – Alien (movie novelization)
  • Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini — A che punto è la notte
  • William Golding – Darkness Visible
  • William Goldman – Tinsel
  • Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter
  • Arthur Hailey – Overload
  • Maarten 't Hart — De aansprekers
  • Douglas Hill – Galactic Warlord
  • Sian James – A Small Country
  • Philippe Jullian – Montmartre
  • Stephen King – The Dead Zone
  • Russell Kirk – The Princess of All Lands
  • Lina Kostenko – Marusia Churai
  • Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (first published in French as Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli)
  • John le Carré – Smiley's People
  • Ursula K. Le Guin – A Wizard of Earthsea
  • Morgan Llywelyn – Lion of Ireland: The Legend of Brian Boru
  • Robert Ludlum – The Matarese Circle
  • Norman Mailer – The Executioner's Song
  • Roger McDonald - 1915: a novel
  • Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹) – Hear the Wind Sing (風の歌を聴け, Kaze no Uta o Kike)
  • V. S. Naipaul – A Bend in the River
  • Ellis Peters – One Corpse Too Many
  • Daniel Pinkwater – Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario
  • Jerry Pournelle – Janissaries
  • Satyajit Ray – Hatyapuri
  • Harold Robbins – Memories of Another Day
  • Philip Roth – The Ghost Writer
  • Mary Stewart – The Last Enchantment
  • Peter Straub – Ghost Story
  • William Styron – Sophie's Choice
  • Trevanian – Shibumi
  • Kaari Utrio – Rautalilja
  • Jack Vance – The Face
  • Kurt Vonnegut – Jailbird
  • Elizabeth Walter – In the Mist and Other Uncanny Encounters
  • William Wharton – Birdy
  • Kit Williams – Masquerade
  • Raymond Williams – The Fight for Manod
  • Robert Anton Wilson – Schrodinger's Cat
  • Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff
  • Roger Zelazny – Roadmarks

    • Children and young people

  • Chris Van Allsburg - The Garden of Abdul Gasazi
  • Katharine Mary Briggs (with Anne Yvonne Gilbert) - Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, & Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies
  • Raymond Briggs – Fungus the Bogeyman
  • Roald Dahl – The Twits
  • Peter Dickinson (with Wayne Anderson as illustrator) – The Flight of Dragons
  • Elizabeth Laird – Rosy's Garden
  • Ellen Raskin – The Westing Game
  • Barbara Sleigh – Carbonel and Calidor
  • Charles Keller (with Dennis Nolan) – Llama Beans
  • Bill Peet – Cowardly Clyde
  • Jacqueline Held (with Claude Held and Willi Glasauer) – Les Voyages interplanétaires de grand-père Coloconte (The Intergalactic Voyages of Christopher Coloconte)
  • Christian Poslaniec (with Willi Glasauer) – Nouvelles de la terre... et d'ailleurs (Newsflash from the Planet Earth...and Beyond)

    • Drama

  • Caryl Churchill – Cloud Nine
  • David Fennario – Balconville
  • Richard Harris – Outside Edge
  • Elfriede Jelinek – Was geschah, nachdem Nora ihren Mann verlassen hatte; oder Stützen der Gesellschaften (What Occurred after Nora Left her Husband, or Supports of Society)
  • Peter Shaffer – Amadeus
  • Sam Shepard – Buried Child
  • Tom Stoppard – Undiscovered Country
  • Bahram Beyzai - Death of Yazdgerd

    • Poetry

  • Kingsley Amis – Collected Poems

    • Non-fiction

  • David Attenborough – Life on Earth
  • Jerome Bruner – On Knowing. Essays for the Left Hand
  • L. Sprague de Camp, editor – The Blade of Conan
  • Elizabeth Eisenstein – The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
  • John Fowles – The Tree
  • Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
  • Douglas Hofstadter – Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
  • Henry Kissinger – The White House Years
  • Leon Litwack – Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery
  • Jean-François Lyotard – The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (La Condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir)
  • Stephen Pile – The Book of Heroic Failures
  • Clark Ashton Smith – The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
  • Margaret Trudeau – Beyond Reason

    • Births

  • February 4 – Ben Lerner, American poet, novelist and critic
  • February 10 – Johan Harstad, Norwegian novelist
  • March 28 – Benjamin Percy, American short story writer
  • June 28 – Florian Zeller, French novelist and dramatist
  • Unknown dates
  • D.D. Johnston, Scottish political novelist and university lecturer
  • Emily St. John Mandel, Canadian-born novelist

    • Deaths

  • January – Dilys Cadwaladr, Welsh-language poet (born 1902)
  • January 27 – Victoria Ocampo, Argentine publisher, writer and critic (born 1890)
  • February 9 – Allen Tate, American poet and essayist (born 1899)
  • February 25 – John L. Wasserman, American entertainment critic (car accident, born 1938)
  • February 27 – Sir George Clark, English historian (born 1890)
  • March 26 – Jean Stafford, American short story writer and novelist (heart failure, born 1915)
  • April 8 – Breece D'J Pancake, American short story writer (suicide, born 1952)
  • May 10 – J. B. Morton (Beachcomber), English humorous newspaper columnist (born 1893)
  • May 14 – Jean Rhys, Dominica, West Indies-born English novelist (born 1890)
  • June 3 – Arno Schmidt, German novelist (born 1914)
  • June 7 – Forrest Carter, American genre novelist (heart failure, born 1925)
  • July 6 – Malcolm Hulke, English TV writer (born 1924)
  • July 21 – Eugène Vinaver, Russian-born English literary scholar (born 1899)
  • July 23 – Joseph Kessel, French journalist and novelist (born 1898)
  • July 29 – Herbert Marcuse, German Jewish philosopher (born 1898)
  • August 8 – Nicholas Monsarrat, English novelist (born 1910)
  • August 16 – Jerzy Jurandot (Jerzy Glejgewicht), Polish poet and dramatist (born 1911)
  • September 25 – Zhou Libo (周立波), Chinese novelist and translator (born 1908)
  • October 6 – Elizabeth Bishop, American poet (born 1911)
  • October 17 – S. J. Perelman, American humorist (born 1904)
  • October 18 – Virgilio Piñera, Cuban poet and short-story writer (born 1912)
  • December 12 – Goronwy Rees, Welsh journalist and academic (born 1909)
  • December 19 – Donald Creighton, Canadian historian (born 1902)

    • Awards

  • Nobel Prize for Literature: Odysseus Elytis

    • Canada

  • See 1979 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

    • France

  • Prix Goncourt:
  • Prix Médicis French:
  • Prix Médicis International:

    • Spain

  • Miguel de Cervantes Prize: Jorge Luis Borges and Gerardo Diego

    • United Kingdom

  • Booker Prize: Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore
  • Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Peter Dickinson, Tulku
  • Cholmondeley Award:
  • James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: William Golding, Darkness Visible
  • James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Brian Finney, Christopher Isherwood: A Critical Biography

    • United States

  • American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction :
  • Nebula Award: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
  • Hugo Award: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
  • Locus Award for Best Novel: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
  • Newbery Medal for children's literature:
  • Bancroft Prize: Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War Against Japan, 1941–1945
  • Bancroft Prize: Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of An American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution
  • Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Sam Shepard, Buried Child
  • Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography: Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews
  • Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
  • Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Penn Warren, Now and Then: Poems 1976–1978
  • Pulitzer Prize for History: Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics
  • Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature

    • Elsewhere

  • Miles Franklin Award: David Ireland, A Woman of the Future
  • Premio Nadal: Carlos Rojas, El ingenioso hidalgo y poeta Federico García Lorca asciende a los infiernos
  • Viareggio Prize: Giorgio Manganelli, Centuria

    • References

    1979 in literature Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


    Similar Topics
    ×