Ruth Fainlight – författare

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.

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's most distinguished poets. Born in New York City, she has lived mostly in England since the age of 15, publishing her first collection, Cages, in 1966, and her retrospective, New & Collected Poems, in 2010. Her poems 'give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events' (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. Her poems ‘give us truly new visions of usual and mysterious events’ (A.S. Byatt). Each is a balancing act between thought and feeling, revealing otherness within the everyday, often measuring subtle shifts in relationships between women and men. She has always drawn on a wide range of subject-matter, yet the arc of her attention has shifted in her later work, the meaning and effect of the passage of time becoming more central and fascinating as she ages. Written during her 80s, the poems of Somewhere Else Entirely are shadowed by the death of her husband Alan Sillitoe. The book also includes several short pieces of prose, memoirs of childhood years spent in the USA: firstly, those from zero to five years old, then a group about the ages between 10 and 15, during the Second World War, when their mother took her and her brother Harry back to their American birthplace.