1969 in literature

See also: 1968 in literature, other events of 1969, 1970 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• The first Booker Prize is awarded;

• Penelope Ashe, author of bestselling novel, Naked Came the Stranger is found to be several people who each took a turn writing a chapter of what they described as "junk" in order to prove that sex-filled trash sells. It did.

New books

• Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle – Vladimir Nabokov
• The Andromeda Strain  – Michael Crichton
• The Campus Murders – Ellery Queen
• The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
• The French Lieutenant's Woman – John Fowles
• The Godfather  – Mario Puzo
• The Green Man – Kingsley Amis
• The Inheritors  – Harold Robbins
• Jirel of Joiry – C. L. Moore
• Little Painted Mouths – Manuel Puig
• The Love Machine  – Jacqueline Susann
• Mary Queen of Scots – Antonia Fraser
• Naked Came the Stranger  – Penelope Ashe
• Nothing Black But A Cadillac – Raymond Spence
• A Pocketful of Rye – A.J. Cronin
• Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
• Retour à Roissy – Pauline Réage
• Sounder  – William H. Armstrong
• The Seven Minutes  – Irving Wallace
• The Street – Mordecai Richler
• That Godless Woman – Merton H. Coleman
• The Veiled Sultan – March Cost
• War Against The Mafia – Don Pendleton

Births

• January  – David Mitchell, novelist
• May 6 – Emmanuel Larcenet, comics author
• unknown date – Adrian Goldsworthy, military historian

Deaths

• January 11 – Richmal Crompton, author
• March 11 – John Wyndham, British author
• March 26 – John Kennedy Toole, author
• March 27 – B. Traven, writer
• May 4 – Osbert Sitwell, novelist, poet, brother of Edith Sitwell and Sacheverell Sitwell
• August 14 – Leonard Woolf, political theorist and husband of Virginia Woolf
• September 6 – Gavin Maxwell, naturalist and author
• September 20 – Elinor Brent-Dyer, Chalet School author
• October 21 – Jack Kerouac, author
• date unknown – Vivian de Sola Pinto, poet and memoirist

Awards

• Booker Prize: P. H. Newby – Something to Answer For
• See 1969 Governor General's Awards for a complete list of winners and finalists for those awards.
• Hugo Award: John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
• Nebula Award: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Lloyd Alexander, The High King
• Nobel Prize for Literature: Samuel Beckett
• Prix Goncourt: Félicien Marceau, Creezy
• Prix Médicis: Hélène Cixous, Dedans
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Howard Sackler, The Great White Hope
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: N. Scott Momaday – House Made of Dawn
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: George Oppen: Of Being Numerous
• Viareggio Prize: Fulvio Tomizza, L'albero dei sogni