Paul Bailey, the twice Booker Prize-shortlisted author who was best known for his novels, including At the Jerusalem and Gabriel's Lament, died October 27, the Guardian reported. He was 87.
In addition to his fiction, Bailey published poetry and nonfiction, including his 1990 memoir An Immaculate Mistake, about growing up gay in a family who believed he was "not natural"; and Three Queer Lives (2001), a biography of three gay entertainers from the 20th century.
Bailey's work "often considers what it means to be an outsider: on the fringes of society or shunned by family," the Guardian noted, adding that he is sometimes seen as part of the "Catholic novel" tradition, after converting as an adult.
Matthew Marland, his literary agent at RCW, described him as "one of RCW's longest-standing and most beloved authors. We shall all miss him greatly."
When he was 30, while working as a shop assistant at Harrods, Bailey wrote his first novel, At the Jerusalem (1967), which won both the Somerset Maugham Award and the Arts Council Writers' Award. Two novels followed, Trespasses and A Distant Likeness, before the publication of Peter Smart's Confessions (1977), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Bailey made the Booker shortlist again in 1986 for Gabriel's Lament. His most recently published work was a second poetry collection, Joie de vivre (2022).
"I write because I have to and want to. It's as simple, or as complicated, as that," he said in his author statement for the British Council. "I share Isaac Babel's lifelong ambition to write with simplicity, brevity and precision. It was he who said 'No steel can pierce the human heart so chillingly as a period at the right moment.' I hope one or two of my full stops have done, and will do, just that."