See also: 1960 in literature, other events of 1961, 1962 in literature, list of years in literature.

Events

• First English production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
• Michael Halliday publishes his seminal paper on the systemic functional grammar model.
• Sylvia Plath suffers a miscarriage.
• William Golding spends a year as writer in residence at Hollins College, Virginia, USA.

New books

• The Agony and the Ecstasy - Irving Stone
• El astillero (The Shipyard) - Juan Carlos Onetti
• Call for the Dead - John le Carré
• The Carpetbaggers - Harold Robbins
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
• Daughter of Silence - Morris West
• The Fox in the Attic - Richard Hughes
• Fate Is the Hunter - Ernest Gann
• Franny and Zooey - J.D. Salinger
• Le front de l'art - Rose Valland
• A House for Mr. Biswas - V. S. Naipaul
• James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
• The Judas Tree - A.J. Cronin
• The Long Revolution - Raymond Williams (non-fiction)
• Mila 18 - Leon Uris
• The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
• No One Writes to the Colonel (El coronel no tiene quien le escriba) - Gabriel García Márquez
• A Passion in Rome - Morley Callaghan
• The Pawnbroker - Edward Lewis Wallant
• The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
• Resistance, Rebellion, and Death - Albert Camus
• Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
• A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
• Some of Your Blood - Theodore Sturgeon
• The Stainless Steel Rat - Harry Harrison
• The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence
• Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert A. Heinlein
• This Sweet Sickness - Patricia Highsmith
• Thunderball - Ian Fleming
• 'Twixt Twelve and Twenty - Pat Boone
• Venusberg - Anthony Powell
• The Wall - John Hersey
• The Wind From Nowhere - J. G. Ballard
• The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck
• Zima Junction - Yevegeny Yevtushenko

New drama

• Samuel Beckett - Rough for Radio I and II
• Max Frisch - Andorra
• Heiner Müller - Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler Woman)
• John Osborne - Luther
• Neil Simon - Come Blow Your Horn
• Tennessee Williams - The Night of the Iguana

Non-fiction

• Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• Marshall McLuhan - The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
• Karl Popper - The Poverty of Historicism
• Bertrand Russell - Has Man a Future?
• Webster's Third New International Dictionary
• Peter Wessel Zapffe - Indføring i litterær dramaturgi (Introduction to literary dramaturgy)

Births

• January 11 - Jasper Fforde, novelist
• February 21 - Chuck Palahniuk, author
• August 20 - Greg Egan, science fiction author
• September 13 - Tom Holt, novelist
• December 30 - Douglas Coupland, author

Deaths

• January 10 - Dashiell Hammett, author
• January 21 - Blaise Cendrars, author
• January 30 - Dorothy Thompson, influential journalist
• June 2 - George S. Kaufman, dramatist and critic
• July 2 - Ernest Hemingway, novelist
• July 12 - Mazo de la Roche, novelist
• September 27 - H.D., poet, novelist and memoirist
• November 2 - James Thurber, humorist

Awards

• Formentor Prize: Jorge Luis Borges and Samuel Beckett
• Lorne Pierce Medal: Robertson Davies
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Scott O'Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
• Nobel Prize for literature - Ivo Andric
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Tad Mosel, All The Way Home
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: Harper Lee - To Kill A Mockingbird
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Phyllis McGinley: Times Three: Selected Verse From Three Decades

1961 books

1961 en die literatuur | 1961 en littérature | 1961 - literatura | Litteraturåret 1961