Alan Sillitoe

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2009

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Alan Sillitoe. 50 years ago his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning captured the truth and brutality of post war working class life. It was a world he knew intimately - he grew up in the tight, terraced streets of Nottingham and, from a very young age, harboured an ambition to escape.

As a child, he read voraciously and knew he wanted to explore the world. During the war he was a navigator in Malaya but, when he returned to Britain, he was shocked to be told he had contracted tuberculosis. As he convalesced in hospital he started writing and, once he had been discharged, his disability pension gave him the security to sustain him while he pursued his career. When Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published, critics said his was a more authentic voice than D H Lawrence's. But the extraordinary reviews made scant impact on Alan Sillitoe - he says he had developed a healthy scorn for the opinions of critics - but he remains grateful, he says, to the book that brought him security and which has allowed him the freedom to write throughout his life.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Le Ca Ira by Edith Piaf Book: The Air Publication 1234 (RAF Manual) Luxury: A communications receiver (receiving only).

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast, but this is about something else you might enjoy.
0:05.4	My name's Katie Lecky and I'm an assistant commissioner for on demand music on BBC Sounds.
0:10.7	The BBC has an incredible musical heritage and culture and as a music lover, I love being part of that.
0:17.4	With music on sounds, we offer collections and mixes for everything, from workouts to helping
0:22.7	you nod off, boogie in your kitchen, or even just a moment of calm. And they're all put together
0:28.7	by people who know their stuff. So if you want some expertly curated music in your life,
0:34.9	check out BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:41.9	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:45.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2009.
1:07.8	Music My castaway this week is the writer Alan Silato.
1:11.8	Fifty years ago, his debut novel, Saturday night and Sunday morning,
1:17.1	unflinchingly captured the truth and brutality of post-war working-class life from the inside.
1:24.5	Brought up in abject poverty, the fear and chaos he brought to the page reflected much of his own early experience.
1:29.5	In the years since, it seems he's rarely put his pen down and has published more than two dozen novels as well as plays, children's stories and poetry collections. He says,
1:35.6	there must have been a point in my life when I decided I had to choose between living and
1:40.3	writing and I chose writing. I wonder what you mean by that, Alan Silliter. Do you feel that
1:46.3	you've, in a way, given up another life because you've chosen to write? Well, I'd read so many
1:53.5	life stories of writers who had cracked up after the first novel, or died young, and I thought to myself, well, I don't want to do that.
2:03.0	I'm in it for life.
2:04.7	Of course, when I say that, it doesn't mean that you can't live.
2:09.6	Of course you can leave.
2:10.4	You have to live, you know, because all sorts of things happen to you.
	...

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