(1928-2010) UK writer best known for early "kitchen-sink drama" novels like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), though he remained active well into the present century. The General (1960), filmed as Counterpoint (1967), involves a hijacked orchestra with abstract armies clashing on an abstract ground, perhaps not Terran. The anti-authoritarian SATIRE, Travels in Nihilon (1971), initially reads as a DYSTOPIA, for the five travellers to that country despise its government and work to overthrow it; but, by story's close, Nihilism as a political creed seems to gain the author's guarded sanction. Both tales convey a sense that the proper, disestablished hero – as delineated in Sillitoe's short essay, The Mentality of the Picaresque Hero (1993 chap) – should cast a cold eye on the organized, politicized world. Snow on the North Side of Lucifer (1979) is a poetry sequence about the war between God and Satan, in which Satan represents science and progress, with some ambivalence. [JC]
born Nottingham, Nottinghamshire: 4 March 1928