Regional Writers - 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' (1) - Alan Sillitoe
- Created by: Alasdair
- Created on: 07-06-18 13:45
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- Regional Writers - 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' (1) - Alan Sillitoe
- 1928-2010
- Born on 4 March 1928 in Nottingham, the second of five children
- Raised in a series of council houses, often whole family to a bedroom
- Working-class family; father Christopher Sillitoe worked in Raleigh Bicycle Factory in Nottingham
- Left school at 14 to work in Raleigh Factory, which he did from age 14-18
- Raleigh (founded 1888) has became biggest bicycle manufacturer in the world by 1913
- Occupies seven acres of land in Faraday Road, Lenton, Nottingham
- 1942-46: undergoes period of self-schooling while working at Raleigh
- 1942: joins Air Training Corps, then Royal Air Force
- 1948: works as radio operator for British Government in the Malayan war of independence (against Communist guerrillas)
- 1949: contracts tuberculosis
- 1950: goes abroad for seven years (France and Spain) to convalesce
- 1955-58: works on 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' in Mallorca ('I wrote it a thousand miles from the actual streets in which it took place, and several years distant in time - which I think enabled me to see things all the more clearly. A sense of place for a writer also involves a sense of distance.'
- 1959: marries American poet Ruth Fainlight; relocates with her to London
- 1960: British director Karel Reisz (of "kitchen sink realism" school) makes film version of SNSM; Sillitoe writes screenplay.
- 1960s: several visits made to the Soviet Union where he is lauded as a social realist writer and voice of the 'oppressed worker'
- 1968: addresses Congress of Soviet Writers' Unions, denouncing Soviet human rights abuses
- 1970s-1990s: lives and works as professional writer in London.
- 19990: awarded honorary doctorate from Nottingham Trent University
- 1995: publishes autobiography, 'Life Without Armour'
- 1997: elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
- 2010: dies of cancer, aged 82, at Charing Cross Hospital, London
- Buried in Highgate Cemetery
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