Alan Sillitoe – författare

This cult classic of working class life in post-war Nottingham follows the exploits of rebellious factory worker Arthur Seaton and is introduced by Richard Bradford.Working all day at a lathe leaves Arthur Seaton with energy to spare in the evenings. A hard-drinking, hard-fighting hooligan, he knows what he wants, and he's sharp enough to get it.Before long, his carryings-on with a couple of married women become the stuff of local gossip. But then one evening he meets a young girl and life begins to look less simple…First published in 1958, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ achieved instant critical acclaim and helped to establish Alan Sillitoe as one of the greatest British writers of his generation. The film of the novel, starring Albert Finney, transformed British cinema and was much imitated.

A superb creation of love, life and class in the post-war world.When Herbert Thurgarton-Strang was seven, his parents – as loving, as doting as any parents of their generation – took him away from India and left him in a boarding school in England which had everything to recommend it except pity. Through the stifling, alarming years which follow, Herbert is held together by the notion of revenge on those loving parents, and by the knowledge that, over there, a new world beckons.And when he’s seventeen, he steals away from school, steals away from Herbert, becomes a different boy; becomes, in Nottingham, Bert the lathe-worker, Bert the womaniser, Bert the soldier, Bert the sometime bruiser. Plunged into the louche life, he bobs like a cork, but eventually Bert/Herbert does lay his demons to rest.

From one of England’s greatest living writers comes a new collection of exquisitely formed stories set in life’s great playground.Relationships – clandestine and legitimate – are the theme: boorish chaps and their stalwart women ululate and hum; marriages and infidelities tick-tock and tick over; Fitzrovian passion flares; strong men turn to drink. Love, sex, loss, are captured in Mr Sillitoe’s inimitable style.As well as the general theme of the union of the sexes, we have inspired insights into birth, boyhood, bereavement and aloneness in a collection of perfectly narrated observations, in which the reader participates in each extraordinary experience.

A top-rate novel of drugs, love and treachery from an author at the height of his powers.Blind Howard, an ex-RAF veteran, possesses an acute sense of awareness, and can see almost better than the sighted. Morse code patterns his universe and keeps his mind tuned sharp to the big and sometimes bad world. Laura, his ever-doting wife, is loveliness personified. Things start to change when he meets the nefarious Richard. Morse is the common denominator of the alliance, but before long Howard’s world of dots and dashes, dits and dahs takes on new darker horizons when he clicks into a drugs racket which means leaving his caring wife for a wild voyage in search of a woman whose voice he has fallen in love with; and a sea-journey with maverick sailors on a heroin heist.

The sequel to ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’.‘Birthday’ is the sequel to Alan Sillitoe’s classic novel of the 1950s, ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’.Four decades on from the novel which was at the forefront of the new wave of British literature, we rediscover the Seaton brothers: older, certainly; wiser – possibly not.Arthur and Brian Seaton, one with an ailing wife, one with an emotional knapsack of failure and success, are on their way to Jenny’s seventieth birthday party. Jenny and Brian had years ago experimented with sex – semi-clothed, stealthy, with the bonus of fear. Arthur, of course, had cut a winning swathe through the married and unmarried women of Nottinghamshire.Life has changed. But there is still pleasure; and still pain.Alan Sillitoe is undoubtedly one of the greatest English writers of our time, and, indeed, one of the most influential.

A wonderful historical novel from one of our best loved and most prolific writersAs a young man Ernest Burton was a bold and reckless journeyman blacksmith, seducing all young girls he comes across. We watch him grow to become a master Blacksmith, and a tyrannical father of eight who refuses even to try to remain faithful to the woman he married and who reigns over his young family with an iron fist, instilling in his sons and daughters a mixture of fear and hatred of him. Burton is an extraordinary fictional creation – a bully who shows no mercy in his relentless terrorism of his sons, he can also be effortlessly charming, with a magnetic attraction that effects all he meets.Written in the sparse, plain language that Sillitoe has made his own, A Man of His Time is a mesmerising portrait of an extraordinary individual, aware that he is, in many ways, the last of a dying breed. It's a rich, absorbing, wonderfully readable novel that covers decades and crosses generations, depicting with singular brilliance an England poised on the brink of change.

From the author of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ come stories of hardship and hope in post-war Britain.The title story in this classic collection tells of Smith, a defiant young rebel, inhabiting the no-man's land of institutionalised Borstal. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frost-bitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running.A groundbreaking work, ‘The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ captured the grim isolation of the working class in the English Midlands when it was first published in 1960s. But Sillitoe’s depiction of petty crime and deep-seated anger in industrial and desperate cities remains as potent today as it was almost half a century ago.

Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010) was an award-winning poet and one of the leading British novelists of the twentieth century. He wrote more than fifty books, establishing an enduring critical and popular success with his 1958 novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which set a new direction in writing about the reality of working-class lives in post-war Britain. His stories of working-class life earned him a reputation as one of the "angry young men" of a new generation of writers. His poetry, however, revealed his own inner life in a way that he found impossible to do in fiction. Presented here are Sillitoe's poems that present the world as he saw it. Using a storyteller's skill, he brought to life the people and places that captured his imagination and took him on a search for meaning. Fascist graffiti scrawled by an unseen hand on a wall in Irkutsk, three sons standing in silence by the grave of their father--this is Sillitoe's world as seen with his poet's eye, a vision that is at the same time clear and precise, politically engaged, fiercely intelligent, and deeply personal. Drawn from his eight volumes of poetry, this selection has been chosen by his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight.