Paul Bailey

Paul Bailey (born February 16, 1937, London, England—died October 27, 2024) was an English author who is perhaps best known for his brief, intense novels.

After attending Central School of Speech and Drama (1953–56), Bailey worked as a stage and television actor and department store salesman before beginning a writing career. He made an immediate impact with his first novel, At the Jerusalem (1967), about a lonely elderly woman’s attempt to survive in a retirement home. A second broken protagonist, blamed by his wife for her suicide, is committed to a mental institution in Trespasses (1970). Bailey sustained the themes of alienation and breakdown in A Distant Likeness (1973) and Old Soldiers (1980), while his considerably longer Gabriel’s Lament (1986) achieves both comedy and tragedy while covering more than four decades in a family’s life.

Bailey’s plays included an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment (produced 1978); among his subsequent writings were the autobiography An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond (1990) and the novels Sugar Cane (1993), Kitty and Virgil (1998), Uncle Rudolf (2002), Chapman’s Odyssey (2011), and The Prince’s Boy (2014). Bailey also wrote Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Fred Barnes, Naomi Jacob, and Arthur Marshall (2001). His last work, published in 2022, was a collection of poems entitled Joie de vivre.