Alan Sillitoe was born on 4 March 1928 in Nottingham, England. He left school at the age of 14 and worked at the Raleigh Bicycle Factory (1942), and as an air traffic control assistant (1945-6). From 1946 to 1949 he served as an RAF wireless operator in Malaya, and after demobilisation was hospitalised for 8 months with tuberculosis, during which time he began to write. Between 1952 and 1958 he travelled in France and Spain with the poet Ruth Fainlight, whom he married in 1959, and was encouraged to write by the poet Robert Graves whom he met in Majorca.

Alan Sillitoe's first volume of poetry, Without Beer or Bread was published in 1957, swiftly followed in 1958 by his first novel, the ground-breaking Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, a vivid portrait of masculinity and Nottinghamshire working-class life. It was awarded the Author's Club First Novel Award and was made into a film starring Albert Finney in 1960, and adapted as a stage play in 1964. The title story of his next book, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), is narrated by a rebellious and angry Borstal boy. It won the Hawthornden Prize and was filmed in 1961 starring Tom Courtenay.

His other novels include the trilogy The Death of William Posters (1965), A Tree on Fire (1967), and The Flame of Life (1974); A Start in Life (1970) and its sequel Life Goes On (1985); the semi-autobiographical Raw Material (1972), which examines working-class attitudes of a Nottingham family to the First World War; The Widower's Son (1976); The Broken Chariot (1998); and The German Numbers Woman (1999), the story of a blind war veteran. Alan Sillitoe's short story collections include The Ragman's Daughter (1963), Men Women and Children (1973), Collected Stories (1995) and Alligator Playground (1998).

He has also published several volumes of poetry, including Poems (1971), with Ted Hughes and Ruth Fainlight, Storm and Other Poems (1974) and Barbarians and Other Poems (1973). As well as adapting his own novels for film he also wrote the screenplay to Che Guevara (1968), and has written stage and television plays. The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim (1967) is the first of several books for children, and he has also written a collection of autobiographical and critical essays, Mountains and Caverns: Selected Essays (1975), several travel books, including The Saxon Shore Way (1983), and a volume of autobiography, Life without Armour (1995).

Alan Sillitoe was Visiting Professor of English at Leicester de Montfort University (1994-7), is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and holds an honorary fellowship from Manchester Polytechnic (1977). He has also been awarded honorary doctorates by Nottingham Polytechnic (1990), Nottingham University (1994) and De Montfort University (1998).

His novel, Birthday (2001), is a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His latest work of fiction is A Man of His Time (2004), the story of a womanising Nottinghamshire Blacksmith.

BBC Nottingham interviewed Alan Sillitoe just before his 80th Birthday, click here if you want like to read the interview