Peter Harry "Paul" BaileyFRSL (16 February 1937 – 27 October 2024) was a British novelist and critic, as well as a biographer of Cynthia Payne and Quentin Crisp.
Bailey began to pursue writing in between acting jobs, and his first novel, At the Jerusalem, was published in 1967.[2][3] The book, set in an old people's home, won a Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Writers' Award. Later books included Peter Smart's Confessions (1977) and Gabriel's Lament (1986), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize;[3][4] and Sugar Cane (1993), a sequel to Gabriel's Lament. Kitty and Virgil (1998) is the story of the relationship between an Englishwoman and an exiled Romanian poet. In Uncle Rudolf (2002), the narrator looks back on his colourful life and his rescue as a young boy from a likely death in fascist Romania, by his uncle, a gifted lyric tenor and the novel's eponymous hero. In his book Chapman's Odyssey (2011), the main character, Harry Chapman, in morphine-induced delirium, encounters characters from literature, writers, deceased friends and family members as he lies seriously ill in a London hospital.[5] Despite his melancholy and fear, Harry entertains the nurses with recitations of some of the favourite poems he has memorised in a lifetime of reading. Bailey's last book was The Prince's Boy (2014), a melancholic gay love story that spans four decades.
Bailey also wrote plays for radio and television: At Cousin Henry's was broadcast in 1964 and his adaptation of J. R. Ackerley's We Think the World of You was televised in 1980. His non-fiction books include a volume of memoir, entitled An Immaculate Mistake: Scenes from Childhood and Beyond (1990), and Three Queer Lives: An Alternative Biography of Naomi Jacob, Fred Barnes and Arthur Marshall (2001), a biography of three gay popular entertainers from the twentieth century.[7]
Bailey was also known as a literary critic, and contributor to The Guardian[8] and in 2001 headed an all-male "alternative" judging panel for the Orange Prize.[9] In 2003 he joined the staff on Kingston University's creative writing course, where he continued to teach as Senior Distinguished Research Fellow until his death. From 2010 to 2019, he wrote theatre criticism for The Oldie.[2]
Personal life and death
Bailey was in a relationship with costume designer David Healy from 1964 until Healy's death in 1986.[1] In 1990 he began a relationship with book publisher Jeremy Trevathan, with whom he entered a civil partnership in 2016.[1] Bailey died on 27 October 2024, at the age of 87.[2]
