1979 in literature

Events

• May – The Merchant Ivory Productions film The Europeans appears. Its screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala draws on the 1878 Henry James novel of the same name.
• October 25 – The London Review of Books is first issued, its founding editors being 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 later calls steampunk.
• August Wilson's Jitney is first produced; it becomes the eighth in his "Pittsburgh Cycle".
• Dambudzo Marechera's The House of Hunger wins the Guardian Fiction Prize.

  New books

Fiction

• 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
• 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
• Eileen Chang – Lust, Caution
• Agatha Christie – Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories
• L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Liberator
• Michael Ende – The Neverending Story
• José Pablo Feinmann – Últimos días de la víctima
• Thomas Flanagan — Year of the French
• Alan Dean Foster – Alien
• Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini — A che punto è la notte
• Brian Garfield - The Paladin
• William Golding – Darkness Visible
• William Goldman – Tinsel
• Nadine Gordimer – Burger's Daughter
• Arthur Hailey – Overload
• Stratis Haviaras – When the Tree Sings
• Douglas Hill – Galactic Warlord
• Stephen King – The Dead Zone
• Russell Kirk – The Princess of All Lands
• Milan Kundera – The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
• John le Carré – Smiley's People
• Morgan Llywelyn – Lion of Ireland: The Legend of Brian Boru
• Robert Ludlum – The Matarese Circle
• Norman Mailer – The Executioner's Song
• Roger McDonald –
• Ellis Peters – One Corpse Too Many
• 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

  Children and young people

• Chris Van Allsburg – The Garden of Abdul Gasazi
• Arthur Blythe – Lenox Avenue Breakdown
• Katharine Mary Briggs – Abbey Lubbers, Banshees, & Boggarts: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Fairies
• Raymond Briggs – Fungus the Bogeyman
• Roald Dahl – The Twits
• Colin Dann – The Animals of Farthing Wood
• Peter Dickinson – The Flight of Dragons
• Elizabeth Laird – Rosy's Garden
• Robie Macauley – A Secret History of Time to Come
• Bill Peet – Cowardly Clyde
• Daniel Pinkwater –
• Ellen Raskin – The Westing Game
• Jane Severance – When Megan Went Away
• Barbara Sleigh – Carbonel and Calidor
• Angela Sommer-Bodenburg – Der kleine Vampir

  Drama

• Bahram Beyzai – Death of Yazdgerd
• 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
• Heiner Müller – Hamletmachine
• Mark Medoff – Children of a Lesser God
• Neil Oram – The Warp
• Peter Shaffer – Amadeus
• Sam Shepard – Buried Child
• Martin Sherman – Bent
• Tom Stoppard – Undiscovered Country

  Poetry

• Kingsley Amis – Collected Poems

  Non-fiction

• Alison Adburgham – Shopping in Style: London from the Restoration to Edwardian Elegance
• David Attenborough – Life on Earth
• Harold Walter Bailey – Dictionary of Khotan Saka
• Jerome Bruner – On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand
• L. Sprague de Camp – The Blade of Conan
• Elizabeth Eisenstein – The Printing Press as an Agent of Change
• Peter Evans – The Music of Benjamin Britten
• John Fowles – The Tree
• Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar – The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
• Eloise Greenfield, Lessie Jones Little, Pattie Ridley Jones -
• 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
• Jessica Mitford – Poison Penmanship: the Gentle Art of Muckraking
• Stephen Pile – The Book of Heroic Failures
• Clark Ashton Smith – The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
• Margaret Trudeau – Beyond Reason
• Tom Wolfe – The Right Stuff

  Births

• February 4 – Ben Lerner, American poet, novelist and critic
• February 10 – Johan Harstad, Norwegian novelist
• March 28 – Benjamin Percy, American short story writer
• June 28 – Florian Zeller, French novelist and dramatist
• July 14 – Yukiko Motoya, Japanese fiction writer, playwright, theatre director and voice actress

• D.D. Johnston, Scottish political novelist and university lecturer
• Emily St. John Mandel, Canadian-born novelist

  Deaths

• January – Dilys Cadwaladr, Welsh-language poet
• January 27 – Victoria Ocampo, Argentine publisher, writer and critic
• February 9 – Allen Tate, American poet and essayist
• February 25 – John L. Wasserman, American entertainment critic
• February 27 – Sir George Clark, English historian
• March 26 – Jean Stafford, American short story writer and novelist
• April 8 – Breece D'J Pancake, American short story writer
• May 10 – J. B. Morton, English humorous newspaper columnist
• May 14 – Jean Rhys, Dominica, West Indies-born English novelist
• June 1 – Eric Partridge, New Zealand/British lexicographer
• June 3 – Arno Schmidt, German novelist
• June 7 – Forrest Carter, American genre novelist
• July 6 – Malcolm Hulke, English television writer
• July 15 – Juana de Ibarbourou, Uruguayan poet
• July 21 – Eugène Vinaver, Russian-born English literary scholar
• July 23 – Joseph Kessel, French journalist and novelist
• July 29 – Herbert Marcuse, German Jewish philosopher
• August 8 – Nicholas Monsarrat, English novelist
• August 16 – Jerzy Jurandot , Polish poet and dramatist
• September 5 – John Bradburne, English poet and missionary
• September 25 – Zhou Libo, Chinese novelist and translator
• October 6 – Elizabeth Bishop, American poet
• October 17 – S. J. Perelman, American humorist
• October 18 – Virgilio Piñera, Cuban poet and short-story writer
• December 12 – Goronwy Rees, Welsh journalist and academic
• December 19 – Donald Creighton, Canadian historian

  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
• Hugo Award: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
• Locus Award for Best Novel: Vonda N. McIntyre, Dreamsnake
• Newbery Medal for children's literature:
• Bancroft Prize: Christopher Thorne, '
• Bancroft Prize: Anthony F. C. Wallace, '
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Sam Shepard, Buried Child
• Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography: Leonard Baker, '
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Robert Penn Warren, '
• Pulitzer Prize for History: Don E. Fehrenbacher,
• Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction: E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature

  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