Novelist, poet and pathologist David Wheldon, who released a number of novels in the 1980s and 1990s, died January 7, the Bookseller reported. He was 70. His first novel, The Viaduct (1983), won the Triple First Award "in a year when Graham Greene and William Trevor were the final judges, and was runner-up for the Whitbread Award." The book was followed by The Course of Instruction, A Vocation and At the Quay.
After those early works, Wheldon "paused his literary career to develop a treatment of multiple sclerosis, with which his wife Sarah Longlands, an artist, had been diagnosed," the Bookseller noted, adding that in recent years he began publishing stories again, with The Guiltless Bystander short story collection due to be released later this year.
Writer David Rose, who introduced Wheldon's short fiction to editors on both sides of the Atlantic, observed: "I was first tipped off about David Wheldon's work by the Irish writer Aiden O'Reilly a few years ago. Aiden had been working in London in the late 1980s and came upon a copy of The Course of Instruction, intrigued by the blurb. Enthralled by the novel itself, he went on to read The Viaduct. In the Internet age, Aiden stumbled on David Wheldon's website, made contact, made friends, and alerted me to his work.
"I too made contact with David, tracked down battered copies of the first two novels in Penguin, and a first edition of the third novel, A Vocation, to my mind the best of the four published novels. However, there is a self-published fifth: Days and Orders, which David sent me. It made a deep impression--a strange, philosophical, existentialist meditation in a timeless, possibly medieval setting."