Alan Sillitoe was born in Nottingham in 1928, into a working-class family. He dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and shortly thereafter joined the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham, just as his father had. In 1946 he joined the Royal Air Force and worked as a radio operator in Malaysia. He returned to England after contracting tuberculosis and had to stay in bed in a hospital for almost a year and a half, which allowed him to devote himself to reading. Thanks to a meager pension from the army, he spent the next seven years wandering between France and Spain. It was in the mid-fifties, on the island of Mallorca, when he began to write, encouraged by the poet Robert Graves. By then she had met her lifelong companion, the American poet Ruth Fainlight. His first novel, Saturday night and Sunday morning (1958; Impedimenta, 2011) and adapted to the big screen by Karel Reisz in 1960, with Albert Finney in the role of Arthur Seaton. His book of stories The loneliness of the long distance runner (1959, Impedimenta, 2013) would end up confirming Sillitoe as one of the most important narrators of his generation. He wrote more than fifty works, including poetry, theater and children's stories, in addition to twenty-five novels. In 1995 he published his autobiography, La vida sin Armor (Impedimenta, 2014). In 1997 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Literature. He died on April 25, 2010 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, after a long battle with cancer.