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David Lodge (author)
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David John Lodge CBE, (born January 28, 1935 at Brockley London, England) is a British author.
first published novel The Picturegoers (1960) draws on his early experiences in 'Brickley' (based on Brockley in S E London) , which are also described in his novel Therapy. World War II forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall.
Lodge studied at University College London, obtaining a BA (with honours) in 1955.
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David John Lodge CBE, (born January 28, 1935 at Brockley London, England) is a British author.
Biography
His first published novel The Picturegoers (1960) draws on his early experiences in 'Brickley' (based on Brockley in S E London) , which are also described in his novel Therapy. World War II forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall.
Lodge studied at University College London, obtaining a BA (with honours) in 1955. In 1959 he married Mary Frances Jacob and received an MA from UCL. He went on to obtain a PhD at the University of Birmingham, and taught English there from 1960 until 1987, being particularly noted for his lectures on Victorian fiction. From 1964-5 he was Harkness Fellow in the United States. He retired from his post at Birmingham in 1987 to become a full-time writer, but he retains the title of Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at the University and continues to live in Birmingham. His papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.
Lodge often satirises academia in general and the humanities in particular in his novels. As Lodge was brought up as a Catholic — though he later described himself as an "agnostic Catholic" — many of his characters are Roman Catholic and their Catholicism is also one of his themes, especially in his novels The British Museum Is Falling Down, How Far Can You Go? (published in the U.S. as Souls and Bodies) and Paradise News.
His fictional locales include the town of "Rummidge", modelled after Birmingham (UK), and the equally imaginary US state of "Euphoria", situated between the states of "North California" and "South California". Euphoria's State University is located in the city of "Plotinus", a thinly disguised version of Berkeley, California.
Several of his novels, including Small World (1988), and Nice Work (1989), have been adapted as television series, the latter by Lodge himself. Nice Work was filmed at the University of Birmingham. In 1994 Lodge adapted Dickens' Martin Chuzzlewit for the BBC.
In 1997 David Lodge was made a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture, and in the 1998 New Years Honours list, he was appointed CBE for his services to literature.
Two of Lodge's novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 Lodge was himself chairman of the Booker Prize judges. His latest novel Deaf Sentence published in 2008, is a comic novel based on his own hearing problems, about a hard of hearing retired academic.
Awards and recognition
- Winner of the Hawthornden Prize and the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize for Changing Places
- Whitbread Book of the Year (1980) for How Far Can You Go?
- Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1984) for Small World
- Shortlisted for the Booker Prize (1988) for Nice Work
- Winner of the Sunday Express Book of the Year award (1988) for Nice Work
- Regional winner and finalist for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (1996) for Therapy
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
- The television serialization of Nice Work (which he adapted himself) won the Royal Television Society's Award for best Drama serial in the year 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival (Monte Carlo; 1990).
Bibliography
Fiction
Non-fiction
- Language of Fiction — 1966
- The Novelist at the Crossroads — 1971
- The Modes of Modern Writing — 1977
- Working with Structualism — 1981
- Write On — 1986
- After Bakhtin — 1990
- The Art of Fiction (book) — 1992
- Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader — 1992
- The Practice of Writing — 1997
- Consciousness and the Novel — 2003
- The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel — 2006
Theatre
- The Writing Game — 1990
- Home Truths — 1999
Adaptations for television
Further reading
- Martin, Bruce K. David Lodge. New York: Twayne, 1999. ISBN 0-8057-1671-8
External links
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