Alan Sillitoe

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 25 January 2009

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

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

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is the writer Alan Silito.
0:31.0	50 years ago his debut, Saturday night and Sunday morning, unflinchingly captured
0:36.8	the truth and brutality of post-war working class life from the inside.
0:41.2	Brought up in abject poverty, the fear and chaos he brought to the page reflected much
0:46.1	of his own early experience. In the years since, it seems he's rarely put his pen down,
0:52.2	and has published more than two dozen novels as well as plays,
0:55.0	children's stories and poetry collections. He says there must have been a point in my life when I decided
1:01.5	I had to choose between living and writing, and I chose writing.
1:06.6	I wonder what you mean by that, Alan Silito.
1:08.9	Do you feel that you've, in a way, given up another life because you've chosen to write?
1:14.0	Well, I read so many life stories of writers who had cracked up after the first novel
1:22.0	or Dine Young and I thought to myself well I don't want to do that I'm in in it for life of
1:28.0	course when I say that it doesn't mean that you you can't live of course you can leave you have to live you know because all sorts of
1:35.2	things happen to you but generally speaking what you should do is watch out that you don't
1:39.8	get overwhelmed by life I knew I had a lot more in me to fuel that work, so that was all right.
1:47.0	Can you describe to me the sense of fulfillment that writing brings you? What do you feel when you write?
1:53.0	Well, you know, it's very difficult to say because when I, I remember on one occasion in the
1:57.0	60s I went to Russia and a Soviet journalist said to me, why and for whom do you write and I said I write because I want to live or because I don't want to die and he couldn't understand but that was exactly what I felt I didn't want to say oh yes I write because I want to give dignity to the
2:15.6	so-called proletariat and all that nonsense I just wrote because I had to write
2:19.4	you see and is it a way of seeing off the end as long as you are writing you are still here and you do exist?
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.