Alan Sillitoe

Alan Sillitoe (1928 ‑ 2010) grew up in Nottingham, leaving school at the age of fourteen to work in the local Raleigh bicycle factory. In 1945 he joined the RAF as a wireless operator and was posted to Malaya, though after contracting tuberculosis he was invalided out.

He met Ruth Fainlight in a bookshop in 1950 and two years later they travelled first to the south of France, then to the island of Mallorca where they lived for four years, becoming lifelong friends with the poet Robert Graves and his wife Beryl. It was there, in the small town of Soller, that Sillitoe began writing the stories and novels about working-class life that were to make him famous as one of the 'angry young men' of a new generation of writers.

He won the Hawthornden Prize in 1960 for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and in 2008 the European Poetry Prize, 'awarded to a poet from one of the countries of the European Community who has testified, through his work and career, the inalienable importance of a united Europe'.

Ruth Fainlight is one of Britain's foremost poets. Born in New York City, she has lived in Europe, mostly England, since she was fifteen. She was married to Alan Sillitoe for over fifty years. Together they adapted Lope de Vega's play Fuenteovejuna, commissioned by the National Theatre and published as All Citizens are Soldiers. She has published more than sixteen books of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (2010) and Somewhere Else Entirely (2018).