Author and critic David Lodge passed away at age 89. Lodge is best known for his novels, Small World and Nice Work, which satirized academic life. His other celebrated works include Changing Places and The British Museum is Falling Down. Changing Places was followed by sequels Small World: An Academic Romance and Nice Work, both of which were nominated for the Booker Prize. In 2018, The Times suggested that Lodge was “probably the most distinguished novelist of his generation not to win it.”
Lodge won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1980 with How Far Can You Go?, which is about young Catholics and their response to the Vatican’s policy on contraception. Lodge’s novels have already become classics and have made an immense contribution to literary culture, according to his publisher Liz Foley. Lodge’s social commentary, meditations on mortality, and laugh-out-loud observations earned him a place in the pantheon of great English comic writers, said his agent Jonny Geller.
Lodge was born and raised in London. He published his first novel in 1960 but made his real breakthrough with Changing Places in 1975. Lodge was made a CBE in 1998 for services to literature and was honored by France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 1997. His other notable works include Therapy, Deaf Sentence, A Man of Parts, and The Art of Fiction, which is an influential collection of essays on literary techniques citing classic examples from a wide range of writers, including Henry James, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.
Lodge’s family said they were very proud of his achievements and of the pleasure that his fiction, in particular, has given to so many people. Lodge was a kind, modest, and funny person who was always ready to look up something that was being disputed, according to his children. Lodge admitted that he was running out of ideas and was writing exclusively non-fiction at the Hay Festival in 2015. “Writers who begin early like I did probably reach their peak in their 40s or 50s,” he said. “After that, books become more of a struggle and take longer to write.
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