Oscar Wilde dies of cerebral meningitis at the Hôtel d’Alsace in Paris.

The French poet Sully Prudhomme receives the first Nobel Prize in Literature.

Having recently abandoned both his family and his wealth to pursue a life of religious asceticism, Leo Tolstoy dies of pneumonia at Astapavo train station at the age of 82.

Rabindranath Tagore becomes the first non-Western writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

After a performance of 'Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore', Luigi Pirandello flees a theatre in Rome pursued by angry audience members.

James Joyce’s 'Ulysses' and T. S. Eliot’s 'The Waste Land' are first published.

In Kierling, not far from Vienna, Franz Kafka dies of tuberculosis at the age of 40.

‘The Great Gatsby’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published.

'Le Temps retrouvé', the last volume of Marcel Proust’s 'A la recherche du temps perdu', is first published.

After several years of spiritual contemplation, Evelyn Waugh is formally received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Federico García Lorca is shot and killed by Nationalist militia near Alfacar, Spain.

George Orwell is shot in the throat and nearly killed by a fascist sniper in Huesca, Spain.

George Bernard Shaw wins the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for 'Pygmalion' and, in so doing, becomes the first person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize.

Virginia Woolf drowns herself in the River Ouse at the age of 59.

Knut Hamsun sends his Nobel Prize in Literature to Joseph Goebbels as a gift, allegedly in an attempt to solicit a meeting with Adolf Hitler.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticising Stalin in a letter to a friend.

W. H. Auden becomes a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Samuel Beckett’s play 'En attendant Godot' ('Waiting for Godot') has its first full theatrical performance in Paris.

Bertolt Brecht is awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.

A year after his death from lung cancer, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s only novel, 'Il Gattopardo' ('The Leopard'), is first published.

At the age of 46, Albert Camus is killed in a car crash near Sens in France.

At the age of 61, Ernest Hemingway dies of a self-inflicted shotgun wound in Ketchum, Idaho.

At the age of 30, Sylvia Plath, in the kitchen of her London apartment, commits suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

After unsuccessfully attempting to inspire a coup d’état to restore powers to the Emperor of Japan, Yukio Mishima commits seppuku, or ritual suicide by disembowelment, in Tokyo.

At the age of 78, surrounded by his family, Vladimir Nabokov dies in Montreux, Switzerland.

'Il nome della rosa' ('The Name of the Rose') by Umberto Eco is first published, and soon becomes an international bestseller.

Following the death of John Betjeman, Philip Larkin is offered, and declines, the position of Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

As a result of perceived blasphemy in 'The Satanic Verses', the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issues a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie and his publishers.

Nearly two decades after leaving Russia for the last time, Joseph Brodsky is appointed United States Poet Laureate.

To the surprise of the international literary establishment, the Italian playwright and actor Dario Fo is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Gao Xingjian becomes the first Chinese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.