Calendar of Literary Facts
1985
- Alison Lurie receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Foreign Affairs
- Spalding Gray receives an Obie Award for Swimming to Cambodia
- Carlos Fuentes publishes El gringo viejo (The Old Gringo)
- Larry McMurtry publishes Lonesome Dove
- Orson Scott Card publishes Ender’s Game
- Jacqueline Briskin publishes Too Much, Too Soon
- Paul Durcan publishes The Berlin Wall Cafe
- Elizabeth Cook-Lynn publishes Seek the House of Relatives
- Jonathan Kellerman publishes When the Bough Breaks
- Carolyn Kizer receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Yin: New Poems
- Bret Easton Ellis publishes Less Than Zero
- Robert Graves dies
- Spalding Gray publishes Swimming to Cambodia
- Live-Aid rock concert in London and New York is held to provide famine relief for Ethiopia
- An earthquake strikes Mexico City, killing 7,000 people
- British scientists discover a hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica
- The Chinese government institutes a bureau to review and control all publications
- Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine receive the Pulitzer Prize in drama for Sunday in the Park with George
- Linda Hogan publishes Seeing through the Sun
- Italo Calvino dies
- Caryl Phillips publishes The Final Passage
- Pat Booth publishes Palm Beach
- Louise Gluck publishes The Triumph of Achilles
- Dominick Dunne publishes The Two Mrs.Grenvilles
- Leonardo Boff publishes Church: Charism and Power; Liberation Theology and the Institutional Church
- Neil Bissoondath publishes Digging Up the Mountains
- President Ronald Reagan signs bill into law empowering the Library of Congress to name a Poet Laureate
- Anne Tyler publishes The Accidental Tourist
- Maeve Binchy publishes Echoes
- Julian Barnes publishes Flaubert’s Parrot
- Jeanette Armstrong publishes Slash
- Vikram Seth receives the Commonwealth Poetry Prize (Asian Region) for The Humble Administrator’s Garden
- Claude Simon receives the Nobel Prize for Literature
- Peter Taylor publishes The Old Forest and Other Stories
- Marguerite Duras publishes La Douleur (The War: A Memoir)
- Keri Hulme receives the Booker Prize for The Bone People
- Vikram Seth publishes The Humble Administrator’s Garden
- Janet Campbell Hale publishes The Jailing of Cecelia Capture
- Larry Duplechan publishes Eight Days a Week
- Hisaye Yamamoto publishes Seventeen Syllables: 5 Stories of Japanese American Life
- E. B. White dies
- Jeanette Winterson publishes Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
- George F. Walker receives the Governor General’s Literary Award in drama for Criminals in Love
- Dan Simmons publishes Song of Kali
- Garrison Keillor publishes Lake Wobegon Days
- Philip Larkin dies (December 2)
- Theodore Sturgeon dies (May 8)
- Alex La Guma dies (October 11)
- Josephine Miles dies (May 12)
- Shiva Naipaul dies (August 15)
- Heinrich Boell dies (July 16)
- Abe Burrows dies (May 17)
- Basil Bunting dies (April 17)
- Jacques Ferron dies (April 22)
- Larry Shue dies (September 23)
- Helen MacInnes dies (September 30)
- Taylor Caldwell dies (August 30)
