1963 in literature

Events

• January 2 – The Traverse Theatre opens in Edinburgh.
• February 11 – The American-born poet Sylvia Plath commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in her London flat about a month after her only novel, the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar, appears and six days after writing her last poem, "Edge".
• March – The Publications and Entertainments Act in South Africa enables the government to impose strict censorship. Des Troye's novel An Act of Immorality is among the first to be prohibited.
• March/April – The Bologna Children's Book Fair is inaugurated.
• March 19 – Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop premières the ensemble musical Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London.
• May 17 – The first Galician Literature Day is held.
• July 16 – A day after admission to the Acland Hospital in Oxford, C. S. Lewis suffers a heart attack. Though later discharged, he dies at home four months later.
• 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.
• September – Publication in India of Bhalchandra Nemade's Bildungsroman, Kosala, considered the first existentialist novel in Marathi literature, written in the author's native village.
• October 21 – The first film from Merchant Ivory Productions is released: The Householder with a screenplay adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from her own novel.
• October 22 – The Royal National Theatre Company is newly formed in the U.K. under Artistic Director Laurence Olivier. Its first performance is with Peter O'Toole as Hamlet, in London.
• November – Tom Wolfe's essay "There Goes That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby Around the Bend..." is published in Esquire magazine in the United States.
• 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 more 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.
• Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's Requiem, an elegy on Soviet sufferings in the Great Purge, composed 1935–1961, is first published complete in book form, without her knowledge, in Munich.
• The first modern publication by mainstream publishers in the U.K. and the United States of John Cleland's novel Fanny Hill causes it to be banned for obscenity in Massachusetts, triggering a court case by its publisher, and prosecution of a London retailer.
• Leslie Charteris publishes his last collection of stories with Simon Templar: The Saint in the Sun. All subsequent Saint books will be ghost-written by others.
• Grace Ogot's short story "A Year of Sacrifice" is published in Black Orpheus.

  New books

Fiction

• J. G. Ballard
• *The Four-Dimensional Nightmare
• *Passport to Eternity
• Simone de Beauvoir – Force of Circumstance
• Thomas Bernhard – Frost
• John Bingham – A Case of Libel
• Heinrich Böll – The Clown
• Pierre Boulle – Planet of the Apes
• 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
• Victor Canning – The Limbo Line
• John Dickson Carr – The Men Who Explained Miracles
• Agatha Christie – The Clocks
• Julio Cortázar – Hopscotch
• Oskar Davičo
• *Ćutnje
• *Gladi
• L. Sprague de Camp – A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales
• L. Sprague de Camp – Swords and Sorcery
• Len Deighton – Horse Under Water
• August Derleth – 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
• Winston Graham – The Grove of Eagles
• Günter Grass – Dog Years
• Georgette Heyer – False Colours
• Ismail Kadare – The General of the Dead Army
• James Kennaway
• * The Bells of Shoreditch
• * The Mindbenders
• Damon Knight –
• John le Carré – The Spy who Came in from the Cold
• J. M. G. Le Clézio – Le Procès-Verbal
• Primo Levi – La tregua
• Liu Yichang – Jiutu
• 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
• Yukio Mishima – The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
• Emily Cheney Neville – It's Like This, Cat
• John O'Hara – Elizabeth Appleton
• Marcel Pagnol
• *The Water of the Hills
• *Jean de Florette
• *Manon des Sources
• Živojin Pavlović – Krivudava reka
• Sylvia Plath – 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 – 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
• Jack Vance – The Dragon Masters
• Tarjei Vesaas – Is-slottet
• 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 – 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
• 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

• Arthur Adamov – La Politique des restes
• Alan Ayckbourn – Mr. Whatnot
• John Barton and Peter Hall – The War of the Roses
• Samuel Beckett – Play
• Emilio Carballido – ¡Silencio Pollos pelones, ya les van a echar su maíz!
• Václav Havel – The Garden Party
• Rolf Hochhuth – The Deputy
• John Mortimer – A Voyage Round My Father
• 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
• Lionel Kearns – Songs of Circumstance
• H. P. Lovecraft – Collected Poems
• Rosemary Tonks – Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms

  Non-fiction

• Nelson Algren – Who Lost an American?
• Hannah Arendt
• *Eichmann in Jerusalem
• *On Revolution
• 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
• Robert Newton Flew – Jesus and His Way. A study of the ethics of the New Testament
• Shelby Foote – – Vol. 2: Fredicksburg to Meridian
• Betty Friedan – The Feminine Mystique
• W. L. Guttsman – The British Political Elite
• Jules Henry – Culture Against Man
• Richard Hofstadter – Anti-intellectualism in American Life
• Martin Luther King, Jr. – Letter from Birmingham Jail
• H. P. Lovecraft – '
• William H. McNeill – '
• Jessica Mitford – The American Way of Death
• Margaret Murray – My First Hundred Years
• Iris Origo – The World of San Bernardino
• Stanisław Ossowski – Class Structure in the Social Consciousness
• W. G. Runciman – Social Science and Political Theory
• E. P. Thompson – The Making of the English Working Class
• UNESCO – History of Mankind – Vol. 1

  Births

• January 3 – Alex Wheatle, black British young adult fiction writer
• January 11 – Jan Arnald, Swedish novelist and critic
• January 18 – Peter Stamm, Swiss writer, dramatist and journalist
• January 30 – Thomas Brezina, Austrian author
• March 26 – Natsuhiko Kyogoku, 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 19 – Michael Symmons Roberts, English poet
• May 24 – Michael Chabon, American author
• May 26 – Simon Armitage, English poet laureate
• June 23 – Liu Cixin, Chinese speculative fiction writer
• June 25 – Yann Martel, Canadian author
• August 15 – Jan Sonnergaard, Danish short-story writer
• September 2 – Thor Kunkel, German novelist
• September 4 – Louise Doughty, English novelist and radio dramatist
• September 6 – Alice Sebold, American novelist
• October 8 – Nick Earls, Australian novelist and children's writer
• October 25 – Dominic Dromgoole, English theatre director and writer
• December 23 – Donna Tartt, American novelist

• Jeff Abbott, American genre novelist
• Joanna Briscoe, English novelist
• Don Paterson, Scottish poet, writer and musician

  Deaths

• January 8 – Kay Sage, American poet
• January 14 – Gustav Regler, German Socialist novelist
• January 29 – Robert Frost, American poet
• February 4 – Brinsley MacNamara, Irish novelist and playwright
• February 11 – Sylvia Plath, American-born poet and novelist
• February 24 – Herbert Asbury, American journalist and writer
• March 4 – William Carlos Williams, American writer
• March 11
• *Deirdre Cash, Australian novelist
• *James Lennox Kerr, Scottish novelist and children's writer
• March 29 – Pola Gojawiczyńska, Polish writer
• May 12 – A. W. Tozer, American religious writer and pastor
• May 28 – Ion Agârbiceanu, Romanian writer and pastor
• June 3 – Nâzım Hikmet Ran, Turkish poet, playwright and novelist
• June 17 – John Cowper Powys, English novelist
• August 1 – Theodore Roethke, American poet
• August 18 – Clifford Odets, American dramatist
• August 27 – W. E. B. Du Bois, American writer, scholar and activist
• September 3 – Louis MacNeice, Irish poet
• September 9 – Ernst Kantorowicz, German historian
• October 11 – Jean Cocteau, French poet, novelist and short story writer
• October – Jolán Földes, Hungarian novelist and playwright
• November 13 – Margaret Murray, Indian-born English archeologist and historian
• November 22
• *Mary Findlater, Scottish novelist
• *Aldous Huxley, English novelist
• *C. S. Lewis, Irish novelist and children's and religious writer
• December 25 – Tristan Tzara, Romanian-born French poet and essayist

  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