1930 in literature

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This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1930.

Events

• January 6 – An early literary character licensing agreement is signed by A. A. Milne, granting Stephen Slesinger U.S. and Canadian merchandising rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works.
• February – Censorship of Publications Board begins to function in the Irish Free State. Among the first 13 books to be banned (announced in May) are Point Counter Point by Aldous Huxley, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and several books on sex and marriage by Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes.
• February 23 – Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front is banned in all Thuringian schools by Education Minister Wilhelm Frick.
• March 19 – Paul Robeson appears in the title role of Othello at the Savoy Theatre, London, with Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona.
• May 6 – Collins Crime Club is launched as an imprint and marketing device for crime fiction published by British publisher William Collins.
• May 10 – John Masefield becomes Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.
• July 14 – Luigi Pirandello's The Man with the Flower in His Mouth becomes the first-ever broadcast television drama, by the BBC in England, directed by Val Gielgud.
• July 19 – Georges Simenon's detective character Inspector Jules Maigret makes his first appearance in print, under Simenon's own name (following his abandonment of pseudonyms), when the novel Pietr-le-Letton (known in English as The Strange Case of Peter the Lett) begins serialization in the French weekly magazine Ric et Rac (published by Fayard). It will appear in book form in 1931 as the fifth of the 75 novels (as well as 28 short stories) Simenon will eventually write featuring the pipe-smoking Paris detective.
• September 11 – Agatha Christie marries archaeologist Max Mallowan in Edinburgh.
• September 24 – First performance of Noël Coward's comedy Private Lives at the Phoenix Theatre (London) featuring Coward, Gertrude Lawrence and Laurence Olivier in the cast.
• September 29 – English satirical novelist Evelyn Waugh is received into the Catholic Church.
• October 13 – Agatha Christie's The Murder at the Vicarage, the first full-length novel to feature her amateur detective character Miss Marple, is published in the United Kingdom in the Collins Crime Club series, having previously been serialized in the United States.
• November 5 – Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
• December 10 – First performance of Bertolt Brecht's Lehrstück The Decision (Die Maßnahme), written in collaboration with Slatan Dudow and the composer Hanns Eisler, at the Großes Schauspielhaus in Berlin with Ernst Busch in the principal rôle.
• John Langalibalele Dube publishes the historical novella Insila kaShaka, the first work of fiction in the Zulu language.
• Franz Kafka's novel The Castle (1926) is first translated into English, by Willa and Edwin Muir.

New prose fiction

• Vicki Baum – Grand Hotel
• Max Brand – Destry Rides Again (original serial version as "Twelve Peers")
• Pearl S. Buck – East Wind: West Wind
• John Dickson Carr – It Walks By Night
• Leslie Charteris – Enter the Saint
• 'Benazous de Chatt' (Abdelkader Chatt) – Mosaïques ternies ("Tarnished Mosaics")
• Gabriel Chevallier – La Peur ("Fear")
• Agatha Christie
  • The Murder at the Vicarage
  • The Mysterious Mr. Quin
  • Giant's Bread (as by Mary Westmacott)
• Albert Cohen – Solal of the Solals
• John Dos Passos – The 42nd Parallel
• William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying
• Rachel Field – Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
• Zona Gale – Bridal Pond
• Jean Giono – Second Harvest
• Milt Gross – He Done Her Wrong: the Great American Novel (wordless novel)
• Dashiell Hammett – The Maltese Falcon
• A. P. Herbert – The Water Gipsies
• Hermann Hesse – Narcissus and Goldmund
• Georgette Heyer – Powder and Patch
• Sydney Horler – Checkmate
• Langston Hughes – Not Without Laughter
• Carolyn Keene – The Secret of the Old Clock
• Oliver La Farge – Laughing Boy
• D. H. Lawrence
  • Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories
  • The Virgin and the Gypsy
• Norman Lindsay – Redheap
• Benito Lynch – The Romance of a Gaucho
• André Malraux – The Royal Way (La Voie Royale)
• Frederic Manning (as "Private 19022") – Her Privates We (first trade edition)
• W. Somerset Maugham – Cakes and Ale
• André Maurois – Fattypuffs and Thinifers (Patapoufs et Filifers; illustrated by Jean Bruller)
• George Moore
  • Aphrodite in Aulis
  • A Flood
• Robert Musil – The Man Without Qualities (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, publication begins)
• Stratis Myrivilis – Η ζωή εν τάφω (I zoí en tafo, "Life in the Tomb"; book publication)
• Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Defense
  • The Eye
• Irène Némirovsky – Le Bal
• Camil Petrescu – Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război (The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War)
• Watty Piper – The Little Engine That Could
• J. B. Priestley – Angel Pavement
• Ellery Queen – The French Powder Mystery
• Arthur Ransome – Swallows and Amazons
• Elizabeth Madox Roberts – The Great Meadow
• Joseph Roth – Job
• Ernst von Salomon – The Outlaws
• Dorothy L. Sayers
  • Strong Poison
  • The Documents in the Case (written with Robert Eustace)
• Nan Shepherd – The Weatherhouse
• Upton Sinclair – Mental Radio
• Olaf Stapledon – Last and First Men
• Miguel de Unamuno – San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
• Ion Vinea – Paradisul suspinelor (A Haven for the Sighs)
• Hugh Walpole – Rogue Herries
• Evelyn Waugh – Vile Bodies
• Thornton Wilder – The Woman of Andros
• Charles Williams – War in Heaven
• Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz – Insatiability (Nienasycenie)
• Philip Gordon Wylie – Gladiator

New drama

• Rudolf Besier – The Barretts of Wimpole Street
• Antoine Bibesco – Ladies All
• Bertolt Brecht – Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny) and The Decision (Die Maßnahme)
• Ferdinand Bruckner – Elisabeth of England
• Jean Cocteau – The Human Voice (La Voix humaine)
• Marc Connelly – The Green Pastures
• Noël Coward – Private Lives
• Geoffrey Kerr – London Calling
• Kwee Tek Hoay – Nonton Tjapgome ("Watching the lantern festival")
• Federico García Lorca – The Public (El público, written) and The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife (La zapatera prodigiosa)

Poetry

Main article: 1930 in poetry

• W. H. Auden – Poems
• Samuel Beckett – Whoroscope
• Frederick Brereton (comp.) – An Anthology of War Poems
• Hart Crane – The Bridge
• Laxmi Prasad Devkota – Muna Madan (मुनामदन)
• T. S. Eliot – Ash Wednesday
• D. Iacobescu – Quasi (posth.)

Non-fiction

• Adrian Bell – Corduroy
• Catherine Carswell – The Life of Robert Burns
• E. K. Chambers – William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems
• William Empson – Seven Types of Ambiguity
• Dion Fortune – Psychic Self-Defence
• Muhammad Iqbal – The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
• James Jeans – The Mysterious Universe
• G. Wilson Knight – The Wheel of Fire: interpretations of Shakespearian tragedy
• Paul Morand – New York
• Edouard de Pomiane – Cuisine en dix minutes
• Alfred Rosenberg – The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Der Mythus des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts)
• W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman – 1066 and All That
• David Unaipon (credited to William Ramsay Smith) – Myths and Legends of the Australian Aboriginals
• Owen Wister – Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship

Births

• January 1 – Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), Syrian-born poet
• January 20 – Blair Lent, American children's author and illustrator (died 2009)
• January 23 – Derek Walcott, Saint Lucian author
• February 17 – Ruth Rendell (Ruth Barbara Grasemann), English detective and mystery novel writer (died 2015)
• March 8 – Douglas Hurd, English politician and novelist
• March 26 – Gregory Corso, American poet (died 2001)
• May 3 – Juan Gelman, Argentine poet (died 2014)
• May 15 – Grace Ogot, Kenyan author (died 2015)
• June 23 – Anthony Thwaite, English poet
• July 6 – Gloria Skurzynski, American author
• July 13 – Sam Greenlee, African American author
• July 15 – Jacques Derrida, French literary critic (died 2004)
• August 9 – Carmen Balcells, Spanish literary agent (died 2015)
• August 17 – Ted Hughes, English poet laureate (died 1998)
• August 27 – Erzsébet Galgóczi, Hungarian novelist, playwright and screenwriter (died 1989)
• September 25 – Shel Silverstein, American poet (died 1999)
• October 2 – Antonio Gala, Spanish poet, playwright and novelist
• October 10 – Harold Pinter, English dramatist (died 2008)
• October 24 – Elaine Feinstein, English poet, novelist and literary biographer
• November 1 – A. R. Gurney, American dramatist
• November 5 – Clifford Irving, American literary forger
• November 16 – Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer, academic and literary critic (died 2013)
• November 18 – J. G. Ballard, English novelist and essayist (died 2009)
• December 2 – Jon Silkin, English poet (died 1997)

Deaths

• January 16 – Johannes Gilhoff, German writer (born 1861)
• February 27
  • Joseph Wright, English philologist and lexicographer (born 1855)
  • George Haven Putnam, American author and publisher (born 1844)
• February 28 – Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, Scottish writer and translator (born 1889)
• March 2 – D. H. Lawrence, English novelist and poet (born 1885)
• March 12 – Alois Jirásek, Czech novelist and dramatist (born 1851)
• April 10 – Alfred Williams, English "hammerman poet" (born 1877)
• April 14
  • Sigurd Ibsen, Norwegian politician and writer (born 1859)
  • Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet (born 1893)
• April 21 – Robert Bridges, English poet and Poet Laureate (born 1844)
• April 22 – Jeppe Aakjær, Danish poet and novelist (born 1866)
• April 29 – Maria Polydouri, Greek poet (born 1902)
• May 15 – William John Locke, British Guiana-born English novelist and playwright (born 1863)
• May 16 – Florence Bell, English writer and playwright (born 1851)
• May 17 – Herbert Croly, American political writer (born 1869)
• June 9
  • Arthur St. John Adcock, English novelist and poet (born 1864)
  • Thomas Herbert Warren, English scholar and poet (born 1853)
• June 23 – Israel Gollancz, English Shakespeare scholar (born 1864)
• July 7 – Arthur Conan Doyle, Scottish writer of crime fiction (born 1859)
• August 23 – Lucien Wolf, English journalist and historian (born 1857)
• August 29 – William Archibald Spooner, English scholar and perpetrator of spoonerisms (born 1844)
• September 4 – Vladimir Arsenyev, Russian travel writer and explorer (born 1872)
• September 5 – Georges de Porto-Riche, French novelist and dramatist (born 1849)
• September 25 – Arthur Way, English-born Australian classicist and translator (born 1847)
• September
  • Thomas Nicoll Hepburn (Gabriel Setoun), Scottish writer and poet (born 1861)
  • Karam Singh, Sikh historian (born 1884)
• November 21 – Jean-Marie-Raphaël Le Jeune, Canadian writer, linguist and Catholic priest (born 1855)
• December 22 – Neil Munro (Hugh Foulis), Scottish humorist, novelist and critic (born 1863)
• Unknown dates
  • Roy Horniman, English novelist and playwright (born 1874)
  • Iso Mutsu (睦 磯, Gertrude Ethel Passingham), English-born Japanese travel writer (born 1867)

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. H. Young, Miss Mole
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Francis Yeats-Brown, Lives of a Bengal Lancer
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Oliver La Farge – Laughing Boy