Paul Bailey was a Literary Fellow at the Universities of Newcastle and Durham, and a recipient of the E.M. Forster Award. In 1973 a bicentennial fellowship took him to the mid-west of America. In 1978 he won a George Orwell Memorial prize for his essay "The Limitations of Despair," published in the Listener. He reviews for the Guardian and the TLS and his journalism is widely published. His books have received critical acclaim. At the Jerusalem won the Somerset Maugham Award and an Arts Council Award for the best novel published between 1963 and 1967. His other books include A Distant Likeness, Peter Smart's Confessions (short-listed for the Booker Prize), Old Soldiers, Trespasses , Gabriel's Lament (shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize), Sugar Cane (1993), An Immaculate Mistake (1990), Kitty and Virgil (1998), Three Queer Lives (2001) and Uncle Rudolf (2002), A Dog's Life (2003), Chapman's Odyssey (2011). The Prince's Boy was published by Bloomsbury in 2014.

At the Jerusalem was republished by Head of Zeus's Apollo Classics list in Autumn 2019, and a new collection of poetry and prose, Inheritance, published at the same time by CB Editions.