Calendar

The Calendar of Literary Facts contains more than 6,500 events in literary history.

1983 Literary Facts

Linda Pastan publishes PM/AM: New and Selected Poems

J. M. Coetzee receives the Booker Prize for Life and Times of Michael K.

Barbara Taylor Bradford publishes Voice of the Heart

Malcolm Bradbury publishes Rates of Exchange

Amy Clampitt publishes The Kingfisher

Thomas Berger publishes The Feud

Marion Zimmer Bradley publishes The Mists of Avalon

Sandra Cisneros publishes The House on Mango Street

Oscar Hijuelos publishes Our House in the Last World

Leon Rooke publishes Shakespeare’s Dog

Timothy Zahn publishes The Blackcollar

David Henry Hwang publishes F.O.B.

Elmore Leonard publishes Stick

Sir William Golding receives the Nobel Prize for Literature for his complete body of work

Horton Foote publishes Tender Mercies

Harvey Fierstein publishes La Cage aux folles

Joseph F. Girzone publishes Joshua

Robert B. Parker publishes PM/AM: New and Selected Poems

Marsha Norman receives the Pulitzer Prize in drama for ’Night, Mother

J. M. Coetzee publishes The Life and Times of Michael K

Ariel Dorfman publishes Widows

Jamaica Kincaid publishes At the Bottom of the River

Martha Grimes publishes The Anodyne Necklace

William Kennedy publishes Ironweed

Vaclav Havel publishes A Private View

William Trevor Cox publishes Fools of Fortune

Beatrice Culleton publishes In Search of April Raintree

Alice Walker receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Color Purple

Lanford Wilson receives an Obie Award (with Circle Repertory Company) for sustained achievement in Off-Broadway theater

John Edgar Wideman publishes Sent for You Yesterday

Athol Fugard publishes “Master Harold”And the Boys

Larry Shue’s drama The Foreigner is produced

The compact disc (CD) is introduced

A famine in Ethiopia, brought on by drought, affects millions

U.S. President Ronald Reagan announces his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), dubbed “Star Wars” by Senator Edward Kennedy and other opponents

U.S. troops invade and liberate Grenada

Violence erupts between the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Sri Lanka

Galway Kinnell receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Selected Poems

Mary Oliver publishes American Primitive

Christina Stead dies

Explore: The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead

Owen Dodson dies

Alden Nowlan dies

Explore: Alden Nowlan

Kenneth Millar dies

Explore: The Underground Man

Gabrielle Roy dies

Explore: Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute

Luis Buñuel dies

Explore: Luis Buñuel

Yves Theriault dies

A truck-bomb destroys the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, killing 241 marines

Paul de Man dies