Alan Sillitoe; Selected Poems

Winner of the European Poetry Prize 2008 A new Selected Poems by one of England's 'Angry Young Men' of the 1950s, author of best-selling novels Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Poems are chosen by Sillitoe's wife, the distinguished poet Ruth Fainlight. Although best known as a novelist, Alan Sillitoe’s prize-winning poetry is central to his work as a writer. He said that his poems revealed his own inner life in a way that he found impossible to do in fiction. This selection has been chosen by his wife, the poet Ruth Fainlight. It includes poems of love and poems that reflect on the world as he saw it, as well as poems that use the story-teller’s skill to bring to life people and places that capture his imagination and take 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. It 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. ‘The poems of a well-travelled man, a reader of maps in many senses, who ranged widely, restlessly, in his life and in his mind; poems that, whether brief lyric or extended parable, all speak to Alan Sillitoe’s flintily individual grasp of the world, in all his voices, authentic, humorous, sardonic and compassionate.’ - Alan Jenkins Alan Sillitoe (1928 – 2010) grew up in Nottingham. He left 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 1950, and in 1952 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 that Sillitoe began writing the stories and novels that were to make his reputation. He established an enduring critical and popular success with his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), which set a new direction in writing about the reality of working-class lives in post-war Britain. Sillitoe wrote over fifty books, including novels, plays, poetry and an autobiography, Life Without Armour. He won the Hawthornden Prize in 1960 for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and the European Poetry Prize in 2008. 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 (1969). She has published more than sixteen books of poetry, including New and Collected Poems (2010) and Somewhere Else Entirely (2018).