1982 in literature

Events

February 17 – Philip K. Dick ignores advice to go immediately to hospital. A fortnight later, after two strokes, he is pronounced brain-dead and disconnected from his life support machine.

March 18 – A legal case brought on behalf of Mary Whitehouse against theatre director Michael Bogdanov concerning alleged indecency in a performance of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre in London is dropped after the Attorney General intervenes.

June 25 – In Island Trees School District v. Pico (457 U.S. 853 (1982)), the Supreme Court of the United States concludes that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'"

September – Banned Books Week instituted in the United States.

La Bicyclette bleue (The Blue Bicycle) by Régine Deforges becomes France's best selling novel ever.

Sue Townsend's comic character Adrian Mole is introduced (as Nigel Mole, aged 13 ¹⁄₄, living in the East Midlands of England) in a BBC Radio 4 play, and then on October 7 in the book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ which sells 1.9 million copies in three years.

The Oxford Shakespeare under the general editorship of Stanley Wells begins publication.

Fiction

Brian Aldiss – Helliconia Spring (First of the Helliconia trilogy)

Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus)

Isaac Asimov – Foundation's Edge

Jean M. Auel – The Valley of Horses

Lynne Reid Banks – The Indian in the Cupboard

René Barjavel – La Tempête

Julian Barnes – Before She Met Me

Michael Bishop – Blooded on Arachne

William Boyd – An Ice-Cream War

Arthur C. Clarke – 2010: Odyssey Two

Shirley Conran – Lace

Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe's Company

L. Sprague de Camp – The Virgin of Zesh & The Tower of Zanid

L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Barbarian

August Derleth – The Solar Pons Omnibus

Marguerite Duras – The Malady of Death

Penelope Fitzgerald – At Freddie's

Ken Follett – The Man from St. Petersburg

John Fowles – Mantissa

Max Frisch – Bluebeard

John Gardner – For Special Services

Graham Greene – Monsignor Quixote

L. Ron Hubbard – Battlefield Earth

Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills

John Jakes – North and South

Thomas Keneally – Schindler's Ark

David Kesterton – The Darkling

Stephen King – Different Seasons, Pet Sematary and The Running Man

W. P. Kinsella – Shoeless Joe

Judith Krantz – Mistral's Daughter

Morgan Llywelyn – The Horse Goddess

Robert Ludlum – The Parsifal Mosaic

Colleen McCullough – An Indecent Obsession

Russell McCormmach – Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist

George R. R. Martin – Fevre Dream

James Merrill – The Changing Light at Sandover

James A. Michener – Space

Timothy Mo – Sour Sweet

Harry Mulisch – The Assault

Chris Mullin – A Very British Coup

Haruki Murakami (村上 春樹) – A Wild Sheep Chase (羊をめぐる冒険, Hitsuji o Meguru Bōken)

Ellis Peters – The Virgin in the Ice

T. R. Subba Rao – Durgaastamana

José Saramago – Memorial do Convento (translated as Baltasar and Blimunda)

Sidney Sheldon – Master of the Game

Elizabeth Smart – The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals

Danielle Steel – Crossings

Kurt Vonnegut – Deadeye Dick

John Wain – Young Shoulders

Alice Walker – The Color Purple

Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice – Water Witch

Gene Wolfe – The Citadel of the Autarch

Roger Zelazny – Eye of Cat and Dilvish, the Damned

Stefan Zweig – The Post Office Girl (Rausch der Verwandlung, "The Intoxication of Transformation")

Children and young people

Chris Van Allsburg - Ben's Dream

Gillian Cross – The Demon Headmaster (first in an eponymous series of six)

Roald Dahl – The BFG

Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone – The Warlock of Firetop Mountain

Margaret Mahy – The Haunting

Michael Morpurgo – War Horse

Ruth Park – The Muddle-Headed Wombat Stays at Home

Sue Townsend – The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾

Bill Peet - The Luckiest One of All

Drama

Caryl Churchill – Top Girls

Peter Flannery – Our Friends in the North

Michael Frayn – Noises Off

Elfriede Jelinek – Clara S, musikalische Tragödie

Maryat Lee and the people of Hinton, West Virginia – A Double-Threaded Life: The Hinton Play

Stephen MacDonald – Not About Heroes

Frank McGuinness – The Factory Girls

Tom Stoppard – The Real Thing

Pirkko Saisio – Betoniyö

Non-fiction

Irving Abella and Harold Troper – None is Too Many

Martin Amis – Invasion of the Space Invaders

Mark Ellingham (ed.) – The Rough Guide to Greece

Bruce Feirstein – Real Men Don't Eat Quiche

Eduardo Galeano – Memoria del fuego (Memory of Fire), vol. 1

Carol Gilligan – In a Different Voice

Sita Ram Goel – How I Became a Hindu

Rhys Isaac – The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790

Ryszard Kapuściński – Shah of Shahs (Szachinszach)

Gary Kinder – Victim: The Other Side of Murder

Audre Lorde – Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

John Naisbitt – Megatrends

Tom Peters – In Search of Excellence

Richard Rorty – Consequences of Pragmatism

Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth

Margaret Trudeau – Consequences

Rebecca West – 1900

Richard Rodriguez – Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez (autobiography)

Births

January 14 – Luke Wright, English poet

February 5 – Lauren Gunderson, American playwright

May 10 – Jeremy Gable, English-American playwright

June 15 – James Lamont, English television writer

Deaths

February 5 – Ronald Welch (Ronald Oliver Felton) Welsh novelist and children's writer writing in English (born 1909)

February 11 – Albert Facey, Australian autobiographer (born 1894)

February 18 – Dame Ngaio Marsh, New Zealand crime writer and theatre director (born 1895)

March 2 – Philip K. Dick, American writer (stroke, born 1928)

March 3 – Georges Perec, French novelist (lung cancer, born 1936)

March 6 – Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist, playwright and screenwriter (born 1905)

March 25 – Hugo Huppert, Austrian poet, writer and translator (born 1902)

June 6 – Kenneth Rexroth, American poet and critic (born 1905)

June 18

Djuna Barnes, American writer (born 1892)

John Cheever, American novelist and short story writer (born 1912)

July 3 – Engvald Bakkan, Norwegian novelist and children's writer (born 1897)

September 14 – John Gardner, American novelist (motorcycle accident, born 1933)

October 7 – Alejandro Núñez Alonso, Spanish novelist (born 1905)

December 5 – Caryl Brahms, English critic, novelist and journalist (born 1901)

December 21 – Ants Oras, Estonian writer (born 1900)

Unknown dates

Ted Lewis, English novelist (born 1940)

Barbara Sleigh, English children's writer (born 1906)

Awards

Nobel Prize in Literature: Gabriel García Márquez

Australia

The Australian/Vogel Literary Award: Brian Castro, Birds of Passage; Nigel Krauth, Matilda, My Darling

Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Fay Zwicky, Kaddish and Other Poems

Miles Franklin Award: Rodney Hall, Just Relations

Canada

See 1982 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

France

Prix Goncourt: Dominique Fernandez, dans la main de l'Ange

Prix Médicis French: Jean-François Josselin, L'Enfer et Cie

Prix Médicis International: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

Spain

Miguel de Cervantes Prize: Luis Rosales

United Kingdom

Booker Prize: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark

Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Margaret Mahy, The Haunting

Cholmondeley Award: Basil Bunting, Herbert Lomas, William Scammell

Eric Gregory Award: Steve Ellis, Jeremy Reed, Alison Brackenbury, Neil Astley, Chris O'Neill, Joseph Bristow, John Gibbens, James Lasdun

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce

Whitbread Best Book Award: Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill

United States

Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize: Lawrence Joseph, Shouting at No One

American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction, Bernard Malamud

Nebula Award for Best Novel: Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time

Newbery Medal for children's literature: Nancy Willard, A Visit to William Blake's Inn

Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Charles Fuller, A Soldier's Play

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Updike – Rabbit Is Rich

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems

Elsewhere

Hugo Award for Best Novel: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh

Premio Nadal: Fernando Arrabal, La torre herida por un rayo