1930 in literature

The year 1930 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

Events

 * January 6 - The first literary character licensing agreement is signed by A. A. Milne, granting Stephen Slesinger U.S. and Canadian merchandising rights to the Winnie-the-Pooh works.
 * July 14 - Luigi Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth becomes the first-ever broadcast television drama.
 * November 5 - Sinclair Lewis is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
 * John Masefield becomes Poet Laureate of the UK.
 * A Boston, Massachusetts court bans Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy (1925) as "obscene".
 * Agatha Christie marries archaeologist Max Mallowan.

New books

 * Vicki Baum - Grand Hotel
 * Pearl S. Buck - East Wind: West Wind
 * John Dickson Carr - It Walks By Night
 * Leslie Charteris - Enter the Saint
 * Agatha Christie
 * The Murder at the Vicarage
 * The Mysterious Mr. Quin
 * ''Giant's Bread (as by Mary Westmacott)
 * John Dos Passos - The 42nd Parallel
 * William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying
 * Rachel Field - Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
 * Zona Gale - Bridal Pond
 * Dashiell Hammett - The Maltese Falcon
 * Hermann Hesse - Narcissus and Goldmund
 * Georgette Heyer - Powder and Patch
 * Sydney Horler - Checkmate
 * Langston Hughes - Not Without Laughter
 * Carolyn Keene - The Secret of the Old Clock
 * Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy
 * D.H. Lawrence - The Virgin and the Gypsy
 * W. Somerset Maugham - Cakes and Ale
 * André Malraux - The Royal Way (La Voie Royale)
 * André Maurois - Fattypuffs and Thinifers (Patapoufs et Filifers)
 * George A. Moore
 * Aphrodite in Aulis
 * A Flood
 * Vladimir Nabokov
 * The Defense
 * The Eye
 * Irène Némirovsky - Le Bal
 * Camil Petrescu - Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război (The Last Night of Love, the First Night of War)
 * Watty Piper - The Little Engine That Could
 * J.B. Priestley - Angel Pavement
 * Ellery Queen - The French Powder Mystery
 * Ayn Rand - Anthem
 * Elizabeth Madox Roberts - The Great Meadow
 * Arthur Ransome - Swallows and Amazons
 * Dorothy L. Sayers
 * Strong Poison
 * The Documents in the Case (written with Robert Eustace)
 * Upton Sinclair - Mental Radio
 * Olaf Stapledon - Last and First Men
 * Miguel de Unamuno - San Manuel Bueno, Mártir
 * Hugh Walpole - Rogue Herries
 * Evelyn Waugh - Vile Bodies
 * Thornton Wilder - The Woman of Andros
 * Philip Gordon Wylie - Gladiator

New drama

 * Antoine Bibesco - Ladies All
 * Bertolt Brecht - Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Decision
 * Ferdinand Bruckner - Elisabeth of England
 * Marc Connelly - The Green Pastures
 * Noel Coward - Private Lives
 * Geoffrey Kerr - London Calling
 * Federico García Lorca - The Public and The Shoemaker's Prodigious Wife

Poetry

 * W.H. Auden - Poems
 * T.S. Eliot - Ash Wednesday
 * William Empson - Seven Types of Ambiguity

Non-fiction

 * Muhammad Iqbal - The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam
 * Edouard de Pomiane - Cuisine en dix minutes
 * W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman - 1066 and All That
 * Owen Wister - Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship

Births

 * January 23 - Derek Walcott, author
 * February 17 - Ruth Rendell, writer
 * March 8 - Douglas Hurd, politician and novelist
 * July 15 - Jacques Derrida, literary critic (d. 2004)
 * August 17 - Ted Hughes, poet (d. 1998)
 * September 25 - Shel Silverstein, poet (d. 1999)
 * October 10 - Harold Pinter, playwright (d. 2008)
 * November 1 - A. R. Gurney, dramatist
 * November 5 - Clifford Irving, literary forger
 * November 16 - Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer, academic, and literary critic
 * November 18 - J.G. Ballard, author (d. 2009)

Deaths

 * January 16 - Johannes Gillhoff, German writer and educator (b. 1861)
 * February 27 - George Haven Putnam, American author, publisher
 * March 2 - D. H. Lawrence, novelist and poet (b. 1885)
 * March 11 - Edward Franklin Albee II, theatre impresario (b. 1857)
 * March 12 - Alois Jirásek, novelist and dramatist
 * April 21 - Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate (b. 1844)
 * April 14 - Vladimir Mayakovsky, Russian poet (b. 1893)
 * April 22 - Jeppe Aakjær, Danish poet and novelist (b. 1866)
 * May 17 - Herbert Croly, political writer
 * June 9 - Arthur St. John Adcock, novelist
 * June 23 - Israel Gollancz, Shakespeare scholar (b. 1864)
 * July 7 - Arthur Conan Doyle, British author and creator of Sherlock Holmes (b. 1859)
 * August 29 - William Archibald Spooner, originator of the "spoonerism" (b. 1844)
 * September - Karam Singh, Sikh historian (b. 1884)
 * September 4 - Vladimir Arsenyev, explorer and travel writer (b. 1872)
 * date unknown
 * Sigurd Ibsen, politician and writer, son of Henrik Ibsen
 * Maria Polydouri, Greek poet (b. 1902)

Awards

 * James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: E. H. Young, Miss Mole
 * James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: Francis Yeats-Brown, Lives of a Bengal Lancer
 * Newbery Medal for children's literature: Rachel Field, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years
 * Nobel Prize for Literature: Sinclair Lewis
 * Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Marc Connelly, The Green Pastures
 * Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Conrad Aiken: Selected Poems
 * Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: Oliver La Farge - Laughing Boy