1945 in literature

• January – In Paris, journalist and poet Robert Brasillach is tried and found guilty of "intelligence with the (German) enemy" during World War II, sparking a major dispute in French society over collaboration and clemency.[1]
• c. January 1 – Jean-Paul Sartre refuses the Légion d'honneur.
• January 27 – Primo Levi is among those liberated from the Auschwitz concentration camp complex.
• February – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is sentenced to eight years in a labour camp for criticizing Joseph Stalin.
• February 13–15 – The bombing of Dresden in World War II is seen by the German Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut as an American prisoner of war, and Miles Tripp as a British bomb aimer. It will feature in Józef Mackiewicz's novel Sprawa pulkownika Miasojedowa (Colonel Miasoyedov's Case, 1962), Bohumil Hrabal's Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains, 1965) and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969).
• March 4 – Poet Pablo Neruda is elected a Chilean senator and officially joins the Communist Party of Chile four months later.
• March 8 – Federico García Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alba, completed just before his assassination in 1936, is first performed, in Buenos Aires.
• March 31 – Tennessee Williams' semi-autobiographical "memory play" The Glass Menagerie (1944, adapted from a short story) opens on Broadway at the Playhouse Theatre (New York City), starring Laurette Taylor and winning the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award.[2]
• About end March – Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs complete their mystery novel And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a fictionalization of manslaughter committed in 1944 by their friend Lucien Carr, but it will not appear fully until 2008.[3]
• May – The Estonian poet Heiti Talvik is deported to Siberia and never heard of again.
• May 2
  • The expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is arrested by the Italian resistance movement and taken to its headquarters in Chiavari, but soon released as of no interest.[4] On May 5, he turns himself in to the United States Army. He is held in a military detention camp outside Pisa, spending 25 days in an open cage before being given a tent. There he appears to suffer a nervous breakdown. While in the camp he drafts The Pisan Cantos.
  • French novelist Colette is the first woman admitted to the Académie Goncourt.
• May 8 – The occupying powers in Allied-occupied Germany and Austria impose publishing curbs as part of denazification.[5]
• June – Australia's best-known literary hoax takes place is published the modernist magazine Angry Penguins: poems by a fictitious Ern Malley. The poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart created the verses from lines of other published work and then submitted them as purportedly by a recently deceased poet. The hoax is on Max Harris, the 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic who had founded Angry Penguins. Harris and his circle agree that an unknown modernist poet of great merit has come to light in suburban Australia. The Autumn 1944 edition with the poems comes out in mid-1945 due to wartime printing delays. An Australian newspaper reveals the hoax within weeks. McAuley and Stewart love early modernist poets, but despise later modernism, especially the well-funded Angry Penguins and Harris's precocious success.
• c. July – Theatre Workshop is formed in the north of England by Joan Littlewood, Ewan MacColl and other former members of Theatre Union as a touring company.
• August 17 – The allegorical dystopian novella Animal Farm by George Orwell, a satire on Stalinism, is first published by Fredric Warburg in London.
• September 11 – The Citizens Theatre opens in Glasgow under this name.
• September – J. B. Priestley's drama An Inspector Calls is premièred in Russian translation in Leningrad.[6]
• October 29 – Vladimir Nabokov's 1940 application for U.S. citizenship is granted.[7]
• November 1 – The U.S. magazine Ebony appears.
• November 26 – The U.K. film Brief Encounter is adapted from Noël Coward's short play Still Life.
• November – Astrid Lindgren's children's book Pippi Långstrump, with illustrations by Ingrid Vang Nyman, is published in Sweden by Rabén & Sjögren, having won a competition run by the publisher for children's books in August. It introduces an anarchic child heroine. An English translation appears as Pippi Longstocking.
• December 21 – André Malraux is named Minister of Information by the new French President, Charles de Gaulle.
• December – Nag Hammadi library, a collection of Gnostic texts, is discovered in Upper Egypt.

• January 3 – David Starkey, English historian
• January 20 – Robert Olen Butler, American novelist and short story writer
• January 30 – Michael Dorris, American writer (died 1997)
• February 12 – David Small, American author and illustrator
• February 23 – Robert Gray, Australian poet and critic
• February 25 – Shiva Naipaul, Trinidad-born novelist (died 1985)
• March 19 – Jim Turner, American literary editor (died 1999)
• April 2 – Anne Waldman, American poet
• April 16 – Sebastian Barker, English poet and journalist (died 2014)
• April 27 – August Wilson, American playwright (died 2005)
• April 30 – Annie Dillard, American poet and prose writer
• June 11 – Robert Munsch, American-Canadian author and academic
• June 21 – Adam Zagajewski, Polish poet, novelist and essayist
• July 5 – Michael Blake, American novelist and screenwriter (died 2015)
• July 9 – Dean Koontz, American novelist
• July 12 – Remy Sylado (Yapi Panda Abdiel Tambayong), Indonesian writer
• July 21 – Wendy Cope, English poet
• July 30 – Patrick Modiano, French novelist, Nobel laureate
• October 15 – John Murrell, American-born dramatist
• November 5 – Richard Holmes, English literary biographer
• November 24 – Nuruddin Farah, Somali novelist
• December 17 – Jacqueline Wilson, English children's writer
• December 21 – Raymond E. Feist, American fantasy writer

Uncertain dates

• Esther Croft, French Canadian novelist and short-story writer
• Mari Strachan, Welsh novelist
• Mohamed Zafzaf, Moroccan novelist (died 2001)

• January 13 – Margaret Deland, American novelist (born 1857)
• January 15 – Ursula Bethell, English-born New Zealand poet (born 1874)
• January 22 – Else Lasker-Schüler, German-born Jewish poet (born 1869)
• January 27 – Antal Szerb, Hungarian writer (in concentration camp, born 1901)
• February 6 – Robert Brasillach, French writer (executed, born 1909)
• February 23 – Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy, Russian writer (born 1883)
• c. March 12 – Anne Frank, German-born Dutch child diarist (probable typhus in concentration camp, born 1929)
• March 20 – Lord Alfred Douglas, English poet (born 1870)
• March 31 – Maurice Donnay, French dramatist (born 1859)
• April – Josef Čapek, Czech artist and writer (in concentration camp, born 1887)
• April 9 – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, German theologian (hanged in concentration camp, born 1906)
• May 15 – Charles Williams, English author (born 1886)
• May 29 – Mihail Sebastian, Romanian Jewish playwright, essayist, and novelist (road accident, born 1907)
• June 5 – Ilie Bărbulescu, Romanian linguist and journalist (born 1873)
• June 8 – Robert Desnos, French poet (in concentration camp, born 1900)
• July 13 – Alla Nazimova, Crimean-born American scriptwriter and actress (born 1879)
• July 25 – Charles Gilman Norris, American novelist (born 1881)
• August 18 – E. R. Eddison, English fantasy writer (born 1882)
• August 20 – Alexander Roda Roda, Austro-Croatian-born novelist (born 1872)
• August 26 – Franz Werfel, Bohemian-born writer (born 1890)
• September 9 – Zinaida Gippius, émigré Russian writer (born 1869)
• September 21 – Ioan C. Filitti, Romanian historian, political theorist and essayist (born 1879)
• September 22 – Thomas Burke, English novelist and story writer (born 1886)
• October 8 – Felix Salten, Austrian-born children's writer (born 1869)
• November 21 – Robert Benchley, American humorist (born 1889)
• December 4 – Arthur Morrison, English writer (born 1863)
• December 28 – Theodore Dreiser, American author (born 1871)

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction: L. A. G. Strong, Travellers
• James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography: D. S. MacColl, Philip Wilson Steer
• Newbery Medal for children's literature: Robert Lawson, Rabbit Hill
• Nobel Prize for literature: Gabriela Mistral
• Premio Nadal: José Félix Tapia, La luna ha entrado en casa
• Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Mary Chase, Harvey
• Pulitzer Prize for Poetry: Karl Shapiro, V-Letter and Other Poems
• Pulitzer Prize for the Novel: John Hersey, A Bell for Adano