David Lodge: Author of Nice Work and Small World Dies at 89

Author and critic David Lodge, best known for his Booker Prize-nominated humorous campus novel Small World and Nice Work, has died aged 89.

In the books, a former literature professor satirized academic life, and both were adapted for television.

His other famous works include Changing Places and The British Museum’s Falling Down, about a poor student who becomes obsessed with trying to write a thesis.

His publisher Liz Foley said: “His contribution to literary culture was enormous, both through his criticism and through his brilliant and famous novels which have already become classics.”

His statement added: “He was a very kind, modest and funny person and I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with him and his wit during his recent publications. And enjoyed enjoying the company.”

His agent Jonny Geller remembered him as a “true gentleman” whose “social commentary, meditations on mortality and laugh-out-loud observations make him a worthy addition to the pantheon of great English comedians”.

He passed away peacefully with his immediate family by his side, publishing house Harrol Secker said.

A statement from his family said they were “very proud of his achievements and the joy his fiction has brought to so many people in particular”.

“Growing up with David Lodge as a father was interesting,” his children recalled.

“Colleges from the University of Birmingham and writers from around the world visited our home in Birmingham,” he said.

“The conversation at the dinner table was always lively, our mother Mary keeping to herself a lot while David read a reference book. was willing to find anything that was disputed.”

Born and raised in London, Lodge published his first novel in 1960 but made his real breakthrough in 1975 with Changing Places.

In 1980, he wrote How For Can You Go? won the White Bread Book of the Year Award with , about young Catholics and their response to the Vatican’s policy on contraception.

Changing Places was followed by the sequels Small World: An Academic Romance in 1984 and Nice Work in 1988, both of which received Booker Prize nominations.

In 2018, The Times said Lodge was “perhaps the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it”.

Literary editor Ruby Millen wrote, “He mines the great flames of frustrated ambition, broken relationships and sexual frustration to create a brilliant social comedy.”

In the same paper, Laura Freeman said: “His Dawn of the Lash novels are written in a whirlwind: corridor crawls at literary conferences, mistaken identities, sexy twins, missed planes, ruined plans.”

BBC Two’s 1989 adaptation of Nice Work included the first use of the word “clitoris” on primetime TV, noted Freeman.

Lodge wrote in his second memoir, Author’s Fate, that he regarded the move as “a feather in my cap”.

In 1992, Lodge published The Art of Fiction, an influential collection of essays on literary techniques that cite classic examples from a wide range of writers, including Henry James, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Lodge’s other books included Therapy, Deaf Sentence and A Man of Parts and he was made a CBE in 1998 for services to literature.

It came a year after he was awarded France’s Order of Arts and Letters.

Speaking at the Hay Festival in 2015, Lodge admitted that he was running out of ideas and was now writing exclusively non-fiction.

“Writers starting out like me probably hit their peak in their 40s or 50s,” he said. “Books then become more of a struggle and take longer to write.”