1963 in literature

This article presents lists of the literary events and publications in 1963.

Events

• January 2 – Traverse Theatre opens in Edinburgh.
• February 11 – American-born poet Sylvia Plath (age 30) commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her London flat during the cold winter of 1962–63 in the United Kingdom about a month after publication of her only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar and six days after writing her last poem, "Edge".
• March – Publications and Entertainments Act in South Africa enables the government to impose strict censorship there. Des Troye's novel An Act of Immorality (an attack on the miscegenation provisions of the country's Immorality Act) is among the first works to be prohibited under it.
• March 19 – Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop premières the ensemble musical play Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London.
• May 17 – First Galician Literature Day.
• July 16 – A day after being admitted to the Acland Hospital in Oxford, C. S. Lewis suffers a heart attack; although later discharged, he dies four months later, at home in Oxford.^[1]
• August 20 – The Royal Shakespeare Company introduces its performance cycle of Shakespeare's history plays under the title The War of the Roses, adapted and directed by John Barton and Peter Hall, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, England.
• October 21 – Release of the first film from Merchant Ivory Productions, The Householder with screenplay adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel.
• October 22 – The National Theatre Company in the United Kingdom, newly formed under artistic director Laurence Olivier,^[2] gives its first performance, with Peter O'Toole as Hamlet, in London.^[3]
• November 17 – Fictional hero 8 Man, created by science fiction writer Kazumasa Hirai and manga artist Jiro Kuwata, appears in print for the first time.
• Novy Mir publishes three further short stories by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn critical of the Soviet regime, including "Matryona's Home"; they will be the last of his works to be published in the Soviet Union until 1990.
• First modern publication by mainstream publishers in both Britain and the United States of John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, 1748-9). The book is banned for obscenity in Massachusetts, triggering a court case by its publisher,^[4] and a London retailer is prosecuted.
• Leslie Charteris publishes his final collection of stories featuring Simon Templar, also known as "The Saint", The Saint in the Sun (he first wrote about the character in 1928). After this, all future Saint books will be ghost-written by other authors, though Charteris will continue in an editorial capacity until the series ends in 1983.
• Grace Ogot's short story "A Year of Sacrifice" (later retitled "The Rains Came") is published in Black Orpheus.
• English novelist Anthony Burgess begins an affair with Italian translator Liana Johnson.

New books

Fiction

• J. G. Ballard
  • The Four-Dimensional Nightmare
  • Passport to Eternity
• Simone de Beauvoir – Force of Circumstance (La Force des choses)
• Thomas Bernhard – Frost
• Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes (La Planète des Singes)
• Pearl S. Buck – The Living Reed
• Anthony Burgess – Inside Mr. Enderby
• Dino Buzzati – A Love Affair
• Taylor Caldwell – Grandmother and the Priests
• Morley Callaghan – That Summer in Paris
• John Dickson Carr – The Men Who Explained Miracles
• Agatha Christie – The Clocks
• Julio Cortázar – Hopscotch (Rayuela)
• Oskar Davičo
  • Ćutnje (Silences)
  • Gladi (Hungers)
• L. Sprague de Camp – A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales
• L. Sprague de Camp (as editor) – Swords and Sorcery
• Len Deighton – Horse Under Water
• August Derleth (as Stephen Grendon) – Mr. George and Other Odd Persons
• J.P. Donleavy – A Singular Man
• Daphne du Maurier – The Glass-Blowers
• Nell Dunn – Up the Junction
• John Fowles – The Collector
• Ian Fleming
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service
  • Thrilling Cities
• Jane Gaskell – The Serpent
• Günter Grass – Dog Years – (Hundejahre)
• John Hawkes – Second Skin
• Georgette Heyer – False Colours
• Ismail Kadare – The General of the Dead Army (Gjenerali i Ushtrisë së vdekur)
• Damon Knight – First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time
• John le Carré – The Spy who Came in from the Cold
• J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Procès-Verbal (The Interrogation)
• Primo Levi – La tregua (The Truce, Reawakening)
• Mary McCarthy – The Group
• John McGahern – The Barracks
• Richard McKenna – The Sand Pebbles
• Alistair MacLean – Ice Station Zebra
• James A. Michener – Caravans
• Spike Milligan – Puckoon
• Emily Cheney Neville – It's Like This, Cat
• John O'Hara – Elizabeth Appleton
• Marcel Pagnol
  • The Water of the Hills (L'Eau des collines)
  • Jean de Florette
  • Manon des Sources
• Živojin Pavlović – Krivudava reka (Curved River, short stories)
• Sylvia Plath (as Victoria Lucas) – The Bell Jar
• Laurens van der Post – The Seed and the Sower
• Thomas Pynchon – V.
• John Rechy – City of Night
• Susan Sontag – Benefactor
• Muriel Spark – The Girls of Slender Means
• Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake) – The Man With the Getaway Face
• Rex Stout – The Mother Hunt
• Erwin Strittmatter – Ole Bienkopp
• Boris and Arkady Strugatsky – Dalyokaya Raduga
• Walter Tevis – The Man Who Fell to Earth
• Jim Thompson – The Grifters
• Rosemary Tonks – Opium Fogs
• Mario Vargas Llosa – The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros)
• Jack Vance – The Dragon Masters
• Tarjei Vesaas – Is-slottet (The Ice Palace)
• Kurt Vonnegut – Cat's Cradle
• Keith Waterhouse – Billy Liar
• Charles Webb – The Graduate
• David Weiss – Naked Came I
• Manly Wade Wellman – Who Fears the Devil?
• Morris West – The Shoes of the Fisherman
• Christa Wolf – Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel)

Children and young people

• Nina Bawden – The Secret Passage
• Hester Burton – Time of Trial
• Paul Gallico – The Day the Guinea-Pig Talked
• Rumer Godden – Little Plum
• Edward Gorey – The Gashlycrumb Tinies
• Ted Hughes – How the Whale Became
• Norton Juster – The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics
• Clive King – Stig of the Dump
• Madeleine L'Engle – A Wrinkle in Time
• Sterling North – Rascal
• Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Book of Giants
• Charles M. Schulz – Happiness Is a Warm Puppy
• Maurice Sendak – Where the Wild Things Are
• Donald J. Sobol – Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective (first in a series of 29 books)
• Rosemary Sutcliff – Sword at Sunset
• Colin Thiele – Storm Boy
• Bill Peet – The Pinkish, Purplish, Bluish Egg
• Feodor Stepanovich Rojankovsky – The Cow Went Over The Mountain

Drama

• Alan Ayckbourn – Mr. Whatnot
• John Barton and Peter Hall (adapted from Shakespeare) – The War of the Roses
• Samuel Beckett – Play (premiered in German as Spiel)
• Václav Havel – The Garden Party
• Rolf Hochhuth – The Deputy (Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel)
• John Mortimer – A Voyage Round My Father (original radio version)
• Bill Naughton
  • Alfie
  • All in Good Time
• Barry Reckord – Skyvers
• Theatre Workshop – Oh, What a Lovely War!

Poetry

• T. S. Eliot – Collected Poems 1909–1962 (selected by author, published on 75th birthday)
• Lionel Kearns – Songs of Circumstance
• H. P. Lovecraft – Collected Poems

Non-fiction

• James Baldwin – The Fire Next Time
• Thomas B. Costain – William the Conqueror
• L. Sprague de Camp – The Ancient Engineers
• Milovan Đilas – Montenegro
• Richard P. Feynman – Six Easy Pieces
• Shelby Foote – The Civil War: A Narrative – Vol 2: Fredicksburg to Meridian
• Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
• Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail
• H. P. Lovecraft – Autobiography: Some Notes on a Nonentity
• William H. McNeill – The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community
• Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death
• E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
• UNESCO – History of Mankind – Vol 1

Births

• January 11 – Jan Arnald (Arne Dahl), Swedish novelist and critic
• January 18 – Peter Stamm, Swiss writer, dramatist and journalist
• January 30 – Thomas Brezina, Austrian author
• March 26 – Natsuhiko Kyogoku (京極 夏彦), Japanese mystery writer
• April 27 – Russell T. Davies, Welsh television writer
• May 5 – Scott Westerfeld, American young-adult novelist
• May 8 – Robin Jarvis, English novelist
• May 24 – Michael Chabon, American author
• June 25 – Yann Martel, Canadian author
• August 15 – Jan Sonnergaard, Danish short-story writer (died 2016)
• September 4 – Louise Doughty, English novelist and radio dramatist
• September 6 – Alice Sebold, American novelist
• October 25 – Dominic Dromgoole, English theatre director and writer
• December 23 – Donna Tartt, American novelist
• Unknown dates
  • Jeff Abbott, American genre novelist
  • Joanna Briscoe, English novelist
  • Don Paterson, Scottish poet, writer and musician
  • Michael Symmons Roberts, English poet

Deaths

• January 8 – Kay Sage, American poet (suicide, born 1898)
• January 14 – Gustav Regler, German Socialist novelist (born 1898)
• January 29 – Robert Frost, American poet (born 1874)
• February 4 – Brinsley MacNamara (John Weldon), Irish novelist and playwright (born 1890)
• February 11 – Sylvia Plath, American-born poet and novelist (suicide, born 1932)
• February 24 – Herbert Asbury, American journalist and writer (born 1889)
• March 4 – William Carlos Williams, American writer (born 1883)
• March 11
  • Deirdre Cash (Criena Rohan), Australian novelist (born 1924)
  • James Lennox Kerr (Peter Dawlish, Gavin Douglas), Scottish novelist and children's writer (born 1899)
• March 29 – Pola Gojawiczyńska, Polish writer (born 1896)
• May 12 – A. W. Tozer, American religious writer and pastor (born 1897)
• May 28 – Ion Agârbiceanu, Romanian writer and pastor (born 1882)
• June 3 – Nâzım Hikmet Ran, Turkish poet, playwright and novelist (heart attack, born 1892)
• June 17 – John Cowper Powys, English novelist (born 1872)
• August 1 – Theodore Roethke, American poet (heart attack, born 1908)
• August 18 – Clifford Odets, American dramatist (cancer, born 1906)
• August 27 – W. E. B. Du Bois, American writer, scholar and activist (born 1868)
• September 3 – Louis MacNeice, Irish poet (pneumonia, born 1907)
• October 11 – Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist and short story writer (born 1889)
• October – Jolán Földes, Hungarian novelist and playwright (born 1902)
• November 22
  • Mary Findlater, Scottish novelist (born 1866)
  • Aldous Huxley, English novelist (cancer, born 1894)
  • C. S. Lewis, Irish novelist and children's and religious writer (renal failure, born 1898)
• December 25 – Tristan Tzara (Samuel Rosenstock), Romanian-born French poet and essayist (born 1896)

Awards

• American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in Poetry: William Carlos Williams
• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Hester Burton, Time of Trial
• Eric Gregory Award: Ian Hamilton, Stewart Conn, Peter Griffith, David Wevill
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Gerda Charles, A Slanting Light
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Georgina Battiscombe, John Keble: A Study in Limitations
• Miles Franklin Award: Sumner Locke Elliott, Careful, He Might Hear You
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
• Nobel Prize for literature – Giorgos Seferis
• Premio Nadal: Manuel Mejía Vallejo, El día señalado
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: no award given
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: William Faulkner – The Reivers
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William Carlos Williams: Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: William Plomer

References