Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe
Born 4 March 1928(1928-03-04) (age 80)
Nottingham, England Occupation Writer Nationality BritishSpouse(s) Ruth FainlightInfluences

Robert Graves

Alan Sillitoe (born 4 March 1928) is an English writer, one of the "Angry Young Men" of the 1950s.

1 Biography
2 Novels
3 Collections of Stories
4 Collections of Poems
5 External links

Biography

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham, to working class parents. Like Arthur Seaton, the anti-hero of Sillitoe's first novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, his father worked in the Raleigh factory.

Joining the Royal Air Force in 1946, Sillitoe was then posted to Malaya where he contracted Tuberculosis. Whilst hospitalised for treatment, he developed a taste for reading and writing, which he was to pursue on discharge in 1949.

Whilst living in Mallorca, Spain with his lover, American poet Ruth Fainlight, in 1955, and in contact with the poet Robert Graves, Sillitoe commenced work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which was published in 1958. Influenced in part by the stripped-down prose of Hemingway, the book conveys the attitudes and situation of a young factory worker faced with the inevitable end of his youthful philandering. As with Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top, the novel's real subject was the disillusionment of post-war Britain, and the lack of opportunities for the working class. It was adapted as a film by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton.

His story The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which concerns the rebellion of a borstal boy with a talent for running, won the Hawthornden Prize in 1959. It was also adapted into a film, this time directed by Tony Richardson, and starring Tom Courtenay (1962).

In 1990, he was awarded an honorary degree from Nottingham Trent University. The city's older, prestigious Russell Group university, The University of Nottingham, also awarded Sillitoe an honorary DLitt degree in 1994, and in 2006 his best known play was staged at the University's Lakeside Arts theatre in an in-house production.

Sillitoe has written many more novels, and several volumes of poetry, listed below. His 1995 autobiography Life Without Armour was critically acclaimed on publication, and offers a view into his squalid childhood.

In 2007 Gadfly in Russia was published an account of his travels in Russia spanning 40 years.

He married Ruth Fainlight, lives in London and has two children.