Professor David Lodge

Professor David Lodge (HF 1964-65) CBE, author and literary critic, graduated from University College London with a BA in 1955, followed (after National Service in the Army) by an MA in 1959. Awarded a Harkness Fellowship in 1964, he went with his family to the United States where he attended Brown University to study American Literature and then travelled across America to California. He described the experience in his memoir Quite A Good Time To be Born (2015) as “an annus mirabilis”. David Lodge is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham where he taught from 1960 to 1987, and still lives in that city. He was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1969 and Henfield Creative Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in 1977. His time in academia gave him a rich source of inspiration for a series of novels which satirize university life, two of which, Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988) were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another major theme in his fiction is Roman Catholicism. How Far Can You Go?(1980) published in the USA as Souls & Bodies, follows the lives of a group of English Catholics through a period of upheaval in the Church. He has also written television screenplays and stage plays and a number of distinguished books of criticism, including The Modes of Modern Writing (1977) and Consciousness and the Novel (2002). David holds several honorary degrees and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts and des Letters. He was appointed CBE in 1998 for services to literature.