Alan Sillitoe was born in 1928 in the Midlands town of Nottingham, near where D.H.nLawrence also grew up. The squalor of his upbringing is vividly evoked in his autobiography, 'Life without Armour' (1995).

His father was a labourer in a cycle factory who became one of the long-term unemployed during the 1930s Depression. Sillitoe says that the only thing he got from his illiterate, fussy and violent father was a disrespect for all forms of authority. He depicts his mother as weepy and ineffectual, resorting to occasional prostitution in order to bring money into the house.

The public library was the place of escape from his father's brutish tyranny but even so he left school at fourteen and went to work in a factory. He might have remained there had he not joined the Royal Air Force at the end of the Second World War as a radio operator and spent several years in Malaya. On returning to England he discovered he had tuberculosis. Paradoxically the illness proved the making of him: he spent sixteen months in an RAF hospital, and during this period he started to write and read intensively.

Sillitoe's first published novel, saturday night and sunday morning (1958), drew on his experiences of his Nottingham working class background. The book was an enormous success and Sillitoe worked on the screenplay of the film version (1960), which won international acclaim.

much of Sillitoe's finest work has been in the short story, most notably the loneliness of the long distance runner (1959). Though many critics have found similarities between Sillitoe's fiction and that of D.H. Lawrence, the only influence he acknowledges in 'Life without Armour' is that of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Yiddish stories taught him that "the poor lead vivid lives and suffer much... one has to write about their tribulations and follies as if one loves them". In much of his work Sillitoe depicts uncompromisingly a world of poverty and petty crime, of wrecked lives and domestic violence, beyond politics and culture, a world in which a "full and tolerable life" is a profoundly unattainable goal. He does so in a compassionate, uncondescending way, finding clues to what it means to be human in the lives and struggles of the urban poor. In such novels as 'The Death of William Poster's (1965) and 'The Open Door' (1989), Sillitoe extends the range of his social critique by involving more intellectual working class characters searching for a more complete life.

Sillitoe's working class tales by no means represent the whole of him. He has been a prolific writer, and though best known for his novels and short stories, he has published children's books (starring the character 'Marmelade Jim'), poetry, and plays. His concerns have widened and become less overtly political. In all of his work the world is seen as a jungle (or as an alligator playground, to borrow the title of a 1997 collection of short stories). Whereas in his earlier work it was an external jungle in which the protagonist must survive through a combination of luck and cunning, more recently the jungle is both external and internal and the focus has shifted from a working class environment to analysis of the psychological states of his characters.