1979 in literature

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

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".

New books

• 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
• Raymond Briggs – Fungus the Bogeyman
• 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
• Dambudzo Marechera – The House of Hunger
• Haruki Murakami – 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

New 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
• Peter Shaffer – Amadeus
• Sam Shepard – Buried Child
• Tom Stoppard – Undiscovered Country

Poetry

Main article: 1979 in poetry

• Kingsley Amis – Collected Poems

Non-fiction

• David Attenborough – Life on Earth
• 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 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 comic 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
• Newbery Medal for children's literature:
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama:
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry:

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