1982 in literature

Events

• February 17 – Philip K. Dick ignores advice to go immediately to hospital. A fortnight later, after two strokes, he is pronounced brain-dead and disconnected from his life-support machine.
• March 18 – A legal case brought on behalf of Mary Whitehouse against theater director Michael Bogdanov concerning alleged indecency in a performance of Howard Brenton's play The Romans in Britain at the National Theatre in London is dropped after the Attorney General intervenes.
• June 25 – In Island Trees School District v. Pico, the Supreme Court of the United States concludes that "local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to 'prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'"
• September – Banned Books Week is instituted in the United States.

• La Bicyclette bleue by Régine Deforges becomes France's all-time bestselling novel.
• Sue Townsend's comic character Adrian Mole is introduced in a BBC Radio 4 play, and then on October 7 in the book The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, which sells 1.9 million copies in three years.
• The Oxford Shakespeare under the general editorship of Stanley Wells begins publication.
• Dorling Kindersley, formerly a book packager, begins publishing.

  New books

Fiction

• Brian Aldiss – Helliconia Spring
• Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits
• Isaac Asimov – Foundation's Edge
• Jean M. Auel – The Valley of Horses
• Lynne Reid Banks – The Indian in the Cupboard
• René Barjavel – La Tempête
• Julian Barnes – Before She Met Me
• Michael Bishop – Blooded on Arachne
• William Boyd – An Ice-Cream War
• Arthur C. Clarke –
• Shirley Conran – Lace
• Bernard Cornwell – Sharpe's Company
• L. Sprague de Camp – The Virgin of Zesh & The Tower of Zanid
• L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter – Conan the Barbarian
• August Derleth – The Solar Pons Omnibus
• Marguerite Duras – The Malady of Death
• Stanley Elkin – George Mills
• Penelope Fitzgerald – At Freddie's
• Ken Follett – The Man from St. Petersburg
• John Fowles – Mantissa
• Max Frisch – Bluebeard
• John Gardner – For Special Services
• Graham Greene – Monsignor Quixote
• L. Ron Hubbard – Battlefield Earth
• Hammond Innes – The Black Tide
• Kazuo Ishiguro – A Pale View of Hills
• John Jakes – North and South
• Thomas Keneally – Schindler's Ark
• David Kesterton – The Darkling
• Stephen King
• *Different Seasons
• *Pet Sematary
• *The Running Man
• W. P. Kinsella – Shoeless Joe
• Judith Krantz – Mistral's Daughter
• Derek Lambert – The Red Dove
• Morgan Llywelyn – The Horse Goddess
• Robert Ludlum – The Parsifal Mosaic
• Colleen McCullough – An Indecent Obsession
• Russell McCormmach – Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
• George R. R. Martin – Fevre Dream
• James Merrill – The Changing Light at Sandover
• James A. Michener – Space
• Timothy Mo – Sour Sweet
• Harry Mulisch – The Assault
• Chris Mullin – A Very British Coup
• Haruki Murakami – A Wild Sheep Chase
• Gerald Murnane – The Plains
• Ellis Peters – The Virgin in the Ice
• T. R. Subba Rao – Durgaastamana
• José Saramago – Memorial do Convento
• Sidney Sheldon – Master of the Game
• Elizabeth Smart – The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals
• Danielle Steel – Crossings
• Anne Tyler – Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
• Kurt Vonnegut – Deadeye Dick
• John Wain – Young Shoulders
• Alice Walker – The Color Purple
• Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice – Water Witch
• Gene Wolfe – The Citadel of the Autarch
• Roger Zelazny
• *Eye of Cat
• *Dilvish, the Damned
• Stefan Zweig – The Post Office Girl

  Children and young people

• Chris Van Allsburg – Ben's Dream
• Gillian Cross – The Demon Headmaster
• Roald Dahl – The BFG
• Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone – The Warlock of Firetop Mountain
• Margaret Mahy – The Haunt–ing
• Michael Morpurgo – War Horse
• Ruth Park – The Muddle-Headed Wombat Stays at Home
• Bill Peet – The Luckiest One of All
• Claude Roy – The Cat who Talked in Spite of Himself
• Sue Townsend – The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾

  Drama

• Caryl Churchill – Top Girls
• Andrea Dunbar – Rita, Sue and Bob Too
• Peter Flannery – Our Friends in the North
• Michael Frayn – Noises Off
• Athol Fugard – "Master Harold"...and the Boys
• Elfriede Jelinek – Clara S, musikalische Tragödie
• Maryat Lee and the people of Hinton, West Virginia – A Double-Threaded Life: The Hinton Play
• Doug Lucie – Hard Feelings
• Stephen MacDonald – Not About Heroes
• Frank McGuinness – The Factory Girls
• Pirkko Saisio – Betoniyö
• Tom Stoppard – The Real Thing

  Non-fiction

• Irving Abella and Harold Troper – None is Too Many
• Martin Amis – Invasion of the Space Invaders
• Luc Brisson – Plato the Myth Maker
• Beth Chatto – The Damp Garden
• Mark Ellingham – The Rough Guide to Greece
• Bruce Feirstein – Real Men Don't Eat Quiche
• Eduardo Galeano – Memoria del fuego, vol. 1
• Carol Gilligan – In a Different Voice
• Sita Ram Goel – How I Became a Hindu
• Traian Herseni – Teoria generală a vieții sociale omenești
• Rhys Isaac – The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790
• Ryszard Kapuściński – Shah of Shahs
• Gary Kinder – '
• Audre Lorde – '
• Elaine Morgan – The Aquatic Ape
• John Naisbitt – Megatrends
• Tom Peters – In Search of Excellence
• Erin Pizzey – Prone to Violence
• Richard Rorty – Consequences of Pragmatism
• Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth
• Margaret Trudeau – Consequences
• Rebecca West – 1900
• Richard Rodriguez –

  Births

• January 14 – Luke Wright, English poet
• February 5 – Lauren Gunderson, American playwright
• March 24 – Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Icelandic children's fiction writer
• May 10 – Jeremy Gable, English-American playwright
• June 15 – James Lamont, English television writer
• August 22 – Ash Lieb, Australian writer

• James Graham, English playwright

  Deaths

• February 5 – Ronald Welch Welsh novelist and children's writer writing in English
• February 11 – Albert Facey, Australian autobiographer
• February 18 – Dame Ngaio Marsh, New Zealand crime writer and theatre director
• March 2 – Philip K. Dick, American writer
• March 3 – Georges Perec, French novelist
• March 6 – Ayn Rand, Russian-born American novelist, playwright and screenwriter
• March 25 – Hugo Huppert, Austrian poet, writer and translator
• June 6 – Kenneth Rexroth, American poet and critic
• June 18
• * Djuna Barnes, American writer
• * John Cheever, American novelist and short story writer
• July 3 – Engvald Bakkan, Norwegian novelist and children's writer
• September 14 – John Gardner, American novelist
• October 7 – Alejandro Núñez Alonso, Spanish novelist
• December 5 – Caryl Brahms, English critic, novelist and journalist
• December 21 – Ants Oras, Estonian writer

• Ted Lewis, English novelist
• Barbara Sleigh, English children's writer

  Awards

• Nobel Prize in Literature: Gabriel García Márquez

  Australia

• The Australian/Vogel Literary Award: Brian Castro, Birds of Passage; Nigel Krauth, Matilda, My Darling
• Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry: Fay Zwicky, Kaddish and Other Poems
• Miles Franklin Award: Rodney Hall, Just Relations

  Canada

• See 1982 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.

  France

• Prix Goncourt: Dominique Fernandez, Dans la main de l'Ange
• Prix Médicis French: Jean-François Josselin, L'Enfer et Cie
• Prix Médicis International: Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

  Spain

• Miguel de Cervantes Prize: Luis Rosales

  United Kingdom

• Booker Prize: Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark
• Carnegie Medal for children's literature: Margaret Mahy, The Haunting
• Cholmondeley Award: Basil Bunting, Herbert Lomas, William Scammell
• Eric Gregory Award: Steve Ellis, Jeremy Reed, Alison Brackenbury, Neil Astley, Chris O'Neill, Joseph Bristow, John Gibbens, James Lasdun
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Richard Ellmann, James Joyce
• Whitbread Best Book Award: Bruce Chatwin, On the Black Hill

  United States

• Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize: Lawrence Joseph, Shouting at No One
• American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction, Bernard Malamud
• Nebula Award for Best Novel: Michael Bishop, No Enemy But Time
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Nancy Willard, A Visit to William Blake's Inn
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Charles Fuller, A Soldier's Play
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Updike – Rabbit Is Rich
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems

  Elsewhere

• Hugo Award for Best Novel: Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh
• Premio Nadal: Fernando Arrabal, La torre herida por un rayo