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After he was demobilised in 1949, Sillitoe lived in Majorca, where Robert Graves advised him, in 1955, to write a novel set in Sillitoe’s home town, Nottingham. He was born there in 1928 and, like his father, had worked in the Raleigh factory. The resulting semi-autobiographical work, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), is now regarded as a defining work of postwar British fiction. Written in a spare, stripped-down style, it deals frankly with the life of a factory hand, disillusioned with the austerity and lack of opportunity in the run-down Midlands of the 1950s. Although Sillitoe is often lumped together with his contemporaries — Kingsley Amis, John Wain, William Cooper — he writes with a more powerfully authentic regional voice and his characters genuinely reject establishment values and rewards.

One to read: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959)

More about Alan Sillitoe

The Times review: Gadfly in Russia by Alan Sillitoe

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