Lodge, David John (1935– )

English novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, and critic. Much of his fiction concerns the role of Catholicism in mid-20th-century England, exploring the situation both through broad comedy and parody, as in The British Museum is Falling Down (1967), and realistically, as in How Far Can You Go? (1980; Whitbread Book of the Year Award). His more recent works include Consciousness and the Novel (2002), a collection of essays that explore the representation of human consciousness in fiction, and the novel Author, Author: A Novel (2004), which focuses on periods in the life of the writer Henry James.

His other works include Changing Places (1975; winner of the Hawthornden Prize) and its sequel Small World (1984), both satirical ‘campus’ novels, Nice Work (1988), Paradise News (1991), Therapy (1995), Home Truths (1999; originally written as a play published in 1998), and Thinks (2001); the play, The Writing Game (1990); and the critical works The Novelist at the Crossroads (1991), After Bakhtin (1990), and The Practice of Writing (1996).

Lodge is also a successful screenwriter, having adapted both his own work and other writers' novels for television. Small World was adapted as a television serial in 1988, and Lodge adapted Nice Work as a four-part serial broadcast in 1989; the latter won the Royal Television Society Award (Best Drama Serial). He also adapted Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit as a six-part television serial, first screened in 1994. Lodge was made a CBE in 1998.