The British writer David Lodge, known in particular for the trilogy in which he ironically depicts the academic environment, has died at the age of 89, his publishing house Vintage Publishing (part of the Random group) announced on Friday, January 3. House). Its publisher Liz Folley specifies in a press release that “his contribution to literary culture has been immense, both through his criticism and through his masterful and emblematic novels which have already become classics“.
“We are very proud of his achievements and the pleasure that his works of fiction, in particular, have brought to so many people“, added his children in the publisher's press release. The novelist is dead”peacefully”, “alongside his close family”, he added.
David Lodge was born a few years before the war, on January 28, 1935, a moment “quite favorable“to be born for a future writer in England,” he said, in a style typical of his deadpan humor.
He grew up in a modest environment, in the south suburbs of London, where university was a “unknown territory“. The writer is a pure product of the meritocracy of England in the 1950s. Pushed by his college teachers, this talented student entered University College London to study literature.
In 1960, he began teaching English literature at the University of Birmingham, where he spent his entire career. The same year, he published his first novel The Picturegoersfollowed in 1962 by Ginger, You’re Barmy.
It’s with his “campus trilogy” – Change of scenery (1975), A very small world (1984) et Board game (1988) – that he demonstrated the extent of his talent. Drawing inspiration from his own experience as a professor, and in particular from a long study trip to the United States, he describes with biting irony the university environment through two representatives of this “minority with exacerbated puritanism“, the Englishman Phillip Swallow and the American Morris Zapp.
The first volume earned him the prestigious Hawthorndern Prize, which recognized him as an author, courted by television, which adapted some of his works. In his bestseller Therapy (1995), he sketches the world of media elites, particularly television.
The final part of his autobiography, Succeed, more or lesss, was published in France in 2023. There had been knighted in the Order of Arts and Letters in 1997.
