British author David Lodge, twice nominated for Booker Prize, dies at 89

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LONDON (AP) — David Lodge, a witty and prolific British novelist and critic who gently satirized academia, religion and even his own loss of hearing in such highly praised narratives as the Booker Prize finalists “Small World” and “Nice Work,” has died. He was 89.

Lodge’s death was announced by Vintage Books UK, which said in a statement that he died Wednesday with his family by his side. Lodge’s wife, Mary, died in January 2022. He is survived by three children, Stephen, Christopher and Julia.

“His contribution to literary culture was immense, both in his criticism and through his masterful and iconic novels which have already become classics,” publisher Liz Foley said in a statement. “He was also a very kind, modest and funny person and I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with him and had the pleasure of enjoying his wit and company.”

Lodge was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998 for services to literature.

Author of more than 20 books and a longtime English professor at the University of Birmingham, Lodge was best known for his trilogy of works — “Changing Places,” “Small World” and “Nice Work” — set in a fictional university in the fictional city of Rummidge, which, the author once noted, just happened to occupy “the space where Birmingham is to be found on maps in the so-called real world.”

In a 1990 interview with The Associated Press, Lodge observed that he didn’t hold strong opinions on many subjects and liked to “put forth novels of contrasting views.”

His work ranged from “Deaf Sentence,” which touched upon mortality and his struggles with hearing, to comic explorations of Catholicism in “How Far Can You Go?” and “The British Museum is Falling Down.”

Lodge, a self-described “agnostic” Catholic influenced by Graham Greene among others, would write about the unexpected challenges in the 1960s to such church doctrines as the ban against artificial contraception.

“It was conceivable that, not being able to obey it (the contraception ban), one might leave the Church; inconceivable that one might in good faith remain a full member of the Church while disobeying, or that the church itself might change its views,” Lodge wrote in the introduction to the paperback edition of “The British Museum Is Falling Down,” in which a Catholic graduate student fears his wife may become pregnant with their fourth child.

“But in the early 1960s, these last two possibilities did at last become thinkable, and came to be thought.”

Lodge, born in 1935 and raised in southeast London, also held vivid memories of England during and after World War II and would say that his humor was shaped in part by air raid drills and the scarcity of goods.

Although he published a well regarded book of criticism, “The Art of Fiction,” he considered novels the best way to express his ideas and shape his thoughts.

“We learn how to negotiate our loves through novels,” he told the AP in 1990. “We learn about experiences beyond our own. A novel is not the only form that does that, but I still think it’s the most versatile of all forms.”