Paul Bailey (British writer)

Paul Bailey (born 16 February 1937) is a British novelist and critic, as well as a biographer of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp.

Paul Bailey attended Sir Walter St John's Grammar School For Boys in Battersea, London. He won a scholarship to the Central School of Speech and Drama in 1953 and worked as an actor between 1956 and 1964. He became a freelance writer in 1967.

He was appointed Literary Fellow at Newcastle and Durham Universities (1972–74), and was awarded a Bicentennial Fellowship in 1976, enabling him to travel to the USA, where he was Visiting Lecturer in English Literature at the North Dakota State University (1977–79). He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1974 and in 1978 he won the George Orwell Prize for his essay "The Limitations of Despair", first published in The Listener magazine. Bailey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999.

Paul Bailey's novels include At The Jerusalem (1967), which is set in an old people's home, and which won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award; Peter Smart's Confessions (1977) and Gabriel's Lament (1986), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction; and Sugar Cane (1993), a sequel to Gabriel's Lament. Kitty and Virgil (1998) is the story of the relationship between an Englishwoman and an exiled Romanian poet. In Uncle Rudolf (2002), the narrator looks back on his colourful life and his rescue as a young boy from a likely death in fascist Romania, by his uncle, a gifted lyric tenor and the novel's eponymous hero. In his book "Chapman's Odyssey" (2011), the main character, Harry Chapman, in morphine-induced delirium, encounters characters from literature, writers, deceased friends and family members as he lies seriously ill in a London hospital. Despite his melancholy and fear, Harry entertains the nurses with recitations of some of the favourite poems he has memorised in a lifetime of reading. His latest book is "The Prince's Boy" (2014), a melancholic gay love story that spans four decades.

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