Calendar

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

1986 Literary Facts

Kingsley Amis receives Booker Prize in fiction for The Old Devils

Wole Soyinka receives the Nobel Prize for Literature

Vikram Seth receives the Commonwealth Poetry Prize for The Golden Gate

Kingsley Amis publishes The Old Devils

Louis Auchincloss publishes Honourable Men

Vikram Seth publishes The Golden Gate

Denise Chávez publishes The Last of the Menu Girls

Jorge Luis Borges dies

Jules Feiffer receives the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning

Mark Mathabane publishes Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa

Brian Lumley publishes Necroscope (Volume 1)

Andrew Lloyd Webber composes music for The Phantom of the Opera

Jimmy Breslin receives Pulitzer Prize for collected newspaper columns

Pat Conroy publishes The Prince of Tides

Maryse Conde publishes Moi, Tituba, sorciere noire de Salem (I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem)

Jimmy Breslin publishes Table Money

Sherley Anne Williams publishes Dessa Rose: A Riveting Story of the South During Slavery

August Wilson publishes Fences

Jane Urquhart publishes The Whirlpool

Rita Dove publishes Thomas and Beulah

Stephen Coonts publishes Flight of the Intruder

Reynolds Price publishes Kate Vaiden

Joseph Brodsky publishes Less than One: Selected Essays

A. W. Purdy publishes The Collected Poems of Al Purdy

Sharon Pollock publishes Doc

The space shuttle Challenger explodes shortly after liftoff, killing the seven-member crew

Robert Penn Warren is named the first Poet Laureate of the United States

Sue Miller publishes The Good Mother

The Voyager II spacecraft passes Uranus and reports the existence of 10 moons around that planet

An explosion and fire in the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine, leads to the evacuation of 133,000 people in the surrounding area

Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme is assassinated

The Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage scandal rocks the Reagan White House

U.S. warplanes bomb Libyan targets in retaliation for a terrorist bombing in West Berlin

Larry McMurtry receives the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Lonesome Dove

Henry Taylor receives the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for The Flying Change

Henry Taylor publishes The Flying Change: Poems

Frank Peretti publishes This Present Darkness

Peter Taylor publishes A Summons to Memphis

Christopher Isherwood dies

Explore: Christopher Isherwood

Jaroslav Seifert dies

Explore: Jaroslav Seifert

L. Ron Hubbard dies

Frank Herbert dies

Explore: Soul Catcher, Dune, Frank Herbert

Harriette Simpson Arnow dies

John Ciardi dies

Explore: John Ciardi

Jean Genet dies

Explore: The Balcony, Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers

William Attaway dies

Explore: William Attaway

Stanley Ellin dies

Fritz Hochwaelder dies

V. C. Andrews dies

John D. Macdonald dies

Explore: The Lonely Silver Rain, One More Sunday, John D. MacDonald