1979 in literature

The year 1979 in literature involved some significant events and new books.

New books

 * 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
 * Raymond Briggs - Fungus the Bogeyman
 * Octavia Butler - Kindred
 * Orson Scott Card - A Planet Called Treason
 * Angela Carter - The Bloody Chamber
 * Agatha Christie - Miss Marple's Final Cases and Two Other Stories
 * L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter - Conan the Liberator
 * Thomas Flanagan -Year of the French
 * Alan Dean Foster -Alien
 * William Golding -  Darkness Visible
 * William Goldman - Tinsel
 * Arthur Hailey - Overload
 * Douglas Hill - Galactic Warlord
 * Sian James - A Small Country
 * Philippe Jullian - Montmartre
 * 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
 * Dambudzo Marechera - The House of Hunger
 * V. S. Naipaul - A Bend in the River
 * Jerry Pournelle - Janissaries
 * 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
 * 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
 * Christopher Wood - James Bond and Moonraker
 * Roger Zelazny -Roadmarks
 * Trevanian -Shibumi

New drama

 * Peter Shaffer - Amadeus
 * Sam Shepard - Buried Child

Poetry

 * Kingsley Amis - Collected Poems

Non-fiction

 * David Attenborough - Life on Earth
 * L. Sprague de Camp, editor - The Blade of Conan
 * John Fowles - The Tree
 * Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar - The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
 * Henry Kissinger - The White House Years
 * Jean-François Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
 * Stephen Pile - The Book of Heroic Failures
 * Clark Ashton Smith - The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith
 * Margaret Trudeau - Beyond Reason

Births

 * March 28 - Benjamin Percy, short story writer

Deaths

 * February 9 - Allen Tate, poet and essayist
 * February 25 - John L. Wasserman, critic
 * March 26 - Jean Stafford, short story writer and novelist
 * May 10 - J. B. Morton, columnist ("Beachcomber")
 * May 14 - Jean Rhys, novelist
 * June 3 - Arno Schmidt, novelist
 * June 7 - Forrest Carter, author
 * July 6 - Malcolm Hulke, TV writer
 * July 29 - Herbert Marcuse, philosopher
 * October 6 - Elizabeth Bishop, poet
 * October 17 - S. J. Perelman, humorist
 * October 18 - Virgilio Piñera, poet and short-story writer
 * December 19 - Donald Creighton, historian
 * date unknown
 * Dilys Cadwaladr, poet
 * Sir George Clark, historian
 * Goronwy Rees, journalist

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:

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
 * Newbery Medal for children's literature:
 * Pulitzer Prize for Drama:
 * Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
 * Pulitzer Prize for Poetry:

Elsewhere

 * Premio Nadal:
 * Viareggio Prize: