Literature

Literature

Novelist and poet Paul Bailey dies at 87

Paul Bailey, British novelist and critic

28 October 2024 18:29 (UTC +04:00)

The twice Booker-shortlisted writer Paul Bailey died on Sunday aged 87, his agent has confirmed. He was best known for his novels At the Jerusalem, Peter Smart’s Confessions and Gabriel’s Lament, APA reports citing The Guardian.

Bailey’s agent at RCW literary agency, Matthew Marland, described him as “one of RCW’s longest-standing and most beloved authors. We shall all miss him greatly.”

When he was 30, while working as a shop assistant at Harrods, he wrote his first novel At the Jerusalem, set in an old people’s home, and described by novelist Philip Hensher as “a masterpiece of imaginative empathy”. The novel won both the Somerset Maugham award and the Arts Council Writers’ award after its publication in 1967.

Two further novels followed, Trespasses and A Distant Likeness, before Peter Smart’s Confessions was published in 1977. The story of an unhappy husband and unsuccessful actor who has attempted suicide was shortlisted for the Booker prize by a judging panel chaired by Philip Larkin. In 1986, Bailey made the Booker shortlist again, for his novel about a teenage boy whose mother disappears, Gabriel’s Lament.

In 1982, Bailey was invited to be a Booker judge, choosing Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally as the winner alongside fellow judges John Carey, Frank Delaney, Janet Morgan and Lorna Sage. It was a controversial choice, as some questioned whether Keneally’s book was fiction or an imaginative work of nonfiction. “There are many things I regret doing, and being a judge for the Booker prize is one of them,” Bailey said afterwards.

“I vowed that I would never repeat the grisly experience, with the horse-trading and bargaining that was a feature of the judging process,” he wrote in the Guardian in 2012. “The vulgarity surrounding the Booker and Costa prizes is not to my pernickety taste.”

Bailey’s most recently published work was his second poetry collection, Joie de vivre, which came out in 2022.

“I write because I have to and want to. It’s as simple, or as complicated, as that,” Bailey said in his author statement for the British Council. “I share Isaac Babel’s lifelong ambition to write with simplicity, brevity and precision. It was he who said ‘No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.’ I hope one or two of my full stops have done, and will do, just that.”