1971 in literature

Events

• March 25–December 14 – The 1971 killing of Bengali intellectuals reaches a peak.
• April 21 – The 13th-century Codex Regius manuscript is returned by Denmark to Iceland under naval escort.
• July 4 – Michael S. Hart posts the first e-book, a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's mainframe computer, as the origin of Project Gutenberg.
• July 14 – Simon Gray's play Butley has its first performance at the Criterion Theatre in London, produced by Michael Codron and directed by Harold Pinter, with Alan Bates in the lead.
• October 20 – The Destiny Waltz by Gerda Charles wins the U.K.'s first Whitbread Novel of the Year Award. Geoffrey Hill wins the poetry prize for Mercian Hymns and Michael Meyer the biography category for Henrik Ibsen.
• November – Hunter S. Thompson's roman à clef Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is first published in Rolling Stone, as a two-part article illustrated by Ralph Steadman.
• November 29 – Yuri Lyubimov's production of Hamlet is seen first at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, with singer-songwriter and poet Vladimir Vysotsky in the lead.
• December 24 – The Dutch writer and broadcaster Godfried Bomans is buried in the Sint-Adelbertskerkhof in Bloemendaal, the Netherlands, two days after he dies from a heart attack.

• Powell's Books opens a first bookstore in Portland, Oregon.

  New books

Fiction

• Kingsley Amis – Girl, 20
• Hiroshi Aramata – Teito Monogatari
• Kofi Awoonor – This Earth, My Brother
• Denys Val Baker – The Face in the Mirror
• Nanni Balestrini – Vogliamo tutto
• John Bingham – Vulture in the Sun
• William Peter Blatty – The Exorcist
• Richard Brautigan – Revenge of the Lawn
• Charles Bukowski – Post Office
• Albert Camus – A Happy Death
• John Dickson Carr – Deadly Hall
• Agatha Christie
• *Nemesis
• *The Golden Ball and Other Stories
• Brian Cleeve – Cry of Morning
• Miloš Crnjanski – Roman o Londonu
• Gwen Davis – Touching
• L. Sprague de Camp – The Clocks of Iraz
• L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Buccaneer
• Walter de la Mare – Eight Tales
• August Derleth, editor – Dark Things
• E. L. Doctorow – The Book of Daniel
• Hubert Fichte – Detlevs Imitationen »Grünspan«
• E. M. Forster – Maurice
• Frederick Forsyth – The Day of the Jackal
• Dick Francis – Bonecrack
• Ernest J. Gaines – The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
• George Garrett – Death of the Fox
• John Gardner – Grendel
• William Golding – The Scorpion God
• Arthur Hailey – Wheels
• Bohumil Hrabal – I Served the King of England
• David Ireland – The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
• Ismail Kadare – Chronicle in Stone
• Anna Kavan – A Scarcity of Love
• Thomas Keneally – The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith
• Jerzy Kosinski – Being There
• Jacques Laurent – Les Bêtises
• John le Carré – The Naive and Sentimental Lover
• Ursula K. Le Guin – The Lathe of Heaven
• Stanisław Lem
• *The Star Diaries
• *The Futurological Congress
• Brian Lumley – The Caller of the Black
• John D. MacDonald – A Tan and Sandy Silence
• Antonine Maillet – La Sagouine
• Ruth Manning-Sanders – A Choice of Magic
• James A. Michener – The Drifters
• Nicholas Mosley – Natalie Natalia
• Alice Munro – Lives of Girls and Women
• Iris Murdoch – An Accidental Man
• V. S. Naipaul – In a Free State
• William F. Nolan – Space for Hire
• Walker Percy – Love in the Ruins
• Rosamunde Pilcher – The End of Summer
• Anthony Powell – Books Do Furnish a Room
• Terry Pratchett – The Carpet People
• Otfried Preußler – Krabat
• Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro – Sergeant Getulio
• Mordecai Richler – St. Urbain's Horseman
• Harold Robbins – The Betsy
• Leonardo Sciascia – Il contesto
• Paul Scott – The Towers of Silence
• Hubert Selby Jr. – The Room
• Cynthia Propper Seton – The Sea Change of Angela Lewes
• Tom Sharpe – Riotous Assembly
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn – August 1914
• Wallace Stegner – Angle of Repose
• Irving Stone – The Passions of the Mind
• Francis Stuart – Black List, Section H
• Gay Talese – Honor Thy Father
• Tom Tryon – The Other
• Fred Uhlman – Reunion
• John Updike – Rabbit Redux
• Joseph Wambaugh – The New Centurions
• Herman Wouk – The Winds of War
• Roger Zelazny
• *The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, and Other Stories
• *Jack of Shadows

  Children and young people

• Jack Bickham – The Apple Dumpling Gang
• Virginia Hamilton – The Planet of Junior Brown
• Roger Hargreaves – Mr. Men
• Judith Kerr – When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
• Bill Peet
• *The Caboose Who Got Loose
• *How Droofus the Dragon Lost His Head
• Otfried Preußler – Krabat
• Dr. Seuss – The Lorax
• Marjorie W. Sharmat – Getting Something on Maggie Marmelstein

  Drama

• Simon Gray – Butley
• Peter Handke – Der Ritt über den Bodensee
• Franz Xaver Kroetz
• *Hartnäckig
• *Heimarbeit
• *Michis Blut: ein Requiem auf bairisch
• *Stallerhof
• *Wildwechsel
• Mustapha Matura – As Time Goes By
• John Mortimer – A Voyage Round My Father
• Martin Walser – :de:Ein Kinderspiel|Ein Kinderspiel

  Poetry

• Maya Angelou – Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie
• Kofi Awoonor – Night of My Blood
• Donald S. Fryer – Songs and Sonnets Atlantean
• Alan Llwyd – Y March Hud
• Clark Ashton Smith – Selected Poems

  Non-fiction

• G. E. M. Anscombe – Causality and Determination
• Pierre Berton – The Last Spike
• Carlos Castaneda – A Separate Reality: Further Conversations with Don Juan
• Dharampal – Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts
• Robert Coles
• *Migrants, Sharecroppers, Mountaineers, vol. 2 of Children of Crisis
• *The South Goes North, vol 3. of Children of Crisis
• Carl N. Degler – Neither Black nor White
• Brian J. Ford – Nonscience
• Robert Foster – The Complete Guide to Middle-earth
• Eduardo Galeano – Open Veins of Latin America
• Joan Garrity – The Sensuous Woman
• Graham Greene – A Sort of Life
• Xaviera Hollander – The Happy Hooker: My Own Story
• H. P. Lovecraft – Selected Letters III
• Roger Manvell and Heinrich Fraenkel – '
• Spike Milligan – '
• Alison Plowden – Young Elizabeth
• John Rawls – A Theory of Justice
• B. F. Skinner – Beyond Freedom and Dignity
• Keith Thomas – Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in 16th and 17th-century England
• Pierre Vallières – White Niggers of America
• Tom Wolfe – The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  Births

• January 6 – Karin Slaughter, American crime novelist
• January 16 – Helen Darville, Australian novelist
• January 18 – Binyavanga Wainaina, Kenyan writer
• January 25 – Philip Coppens, Belgian journalist and author
• February 3 – Sarah Kane, English playwright
• March 13 – Viet Thanh Nguyen, Vietnamese fiction writer
• March 29 – José Luis Rodríguez Pittí, Panamanian writer and photographer
• May 28 – Richard Gunn, English journalist and motoring writer
• May 9 – Dan Chiasson, American poet, critic and journalist
• June 28 – Sophie Hannah, English poet and novelist
• July 17 – Cory Doctorow, Canadian science fiction writer
• July 22 – Akhil Sharma, Indian novelist
• July 23 – Mohsin Hamid, Pakistani fiction writer
• September 3 – Kiran Desai, Indian novelist
• October 25 – Elif Shafak, French-born Turkish novelist
• November 5 – Rana Dasgupta, English-born Indian novelist
• December 19 – Tristan Egolf, American novelist and activist

• Diana Evans, English novelist of Nigerian extraction
• Petina Gappah, Zimbabwean-born fiction writer
• John Wray, American novelist

  Deaths

• January 24 – St. John Greer Ervine, Irish-born dramatist
• March 5 – Allan Nevins, American journalist and historian
• March 7 – Stevie Smith, English poet and novelist
• March 21 – Kyūya Fukada, Japanese writer and mountaineer
• March 23 – Simon Vestdijk, Dutch writer
• April 10 – André Billy, French novelist
• May 19 – Ogden Nash, American poet and humorist
• May 20 – Waldo Williams, Welsh-language poet
• June 1 – Reinhold Niebuhr, American theologian
• June 4 – György Lukács, Hungarian philosopher and critic
• June 5 – Clifford Dyment, English poet
• June 6 – Edward Andrade, English writer, poet and physicist
• July 4
• *Maurice Bowra, English poet, humorist and Oxford don
• *August Derleth, American writer and anthologist
• July 7 – Claude Gauvreau, Québécois Canadian poet and dramatist
• July 27 – Jacques Lusseyran, French author and Resistance fighter
• August 30 – Peter Fleming, English travel writer and traveler
• October 13 – János Kemény, American-born Hungarian writer and editor
• October 21 – Naoya Shiga, Japanese novelist
• October 25 – Philip Wylie, American novelist and non-fiction writer
• November – Lucia Mantu, Romanian writer
• November 1 – Gertrud von Le Fort, German novelist, poet and essayist
• November 10 – Walter Van Tilburg Clark, American novelist
• November 11 – A. P. Herbert, English humorist, novelist and politician
• December 5 – Gaito Gazdanov, Russian-born novelist
• December 22 – Godfried Bomans, Dutch writer and broadcaster
• December 25 – S. Foster Damon, American critic and poet

  Awards

• Nobel Prize for Literature: Pablo Neruda

  Canada

• See 1971 Governor General's Awards for complete list.

  France

• Prix Goncourt: Jacques Laurent, Les Bêtises
• Prix Médicis: Pascal Lainé, L'Irrévolution

  United Kingdom

• Booker Prize: V. S. Naipaul, In a Free State
• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Ivan Southall, Josh
• Cholmondeley Award: Charles Causley, Gavin Ewart, Hugo Williams
• Eric Gregory Award: Martin Booth, Florence Bull, John Pook, D. M. Warman, John Welch
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Nadine Gordimer, A Guest of Honour
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Julia Namier, Lewis Namier
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry: Stephen Spender

  United States

• Frost Medal: Melville Cane
• Hugo Award: Larry Niven, Ringworld
• Nebula Award: Robert Silverberg, A Time of Changes
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Betsy Byars, Summer of the Swans
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Paul Zindel, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: no award given
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: William S. Merwin, The Carrier of Ladders

  Elsewhere

• Akutagawa Prize: Azuma Mineo, Okinawan Boy
• Miles Franklin Award: David Ireland, The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
• Alfaguara Prize: Luis Berenguer, Leña verde
• Premio Nadal: José María Requena, El cuajarón
• Viareggio Prize: Ugo Attardi, L'erede selvaggio