Author Bio

 

 

 

Stan Barstow was born in Horbury in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1928, the only child of a miner. He attended Ossett Grammar School until he was sixteen, then went to work as a draughtsman at a local engineering firm. He married Constance Kershaw in 1951 and they had two children.

 

He was a novelist and scriptwriter; he won awards, including Baftas, for his TV and radio dramatisations. He is best known for his novel, A Kind of Loving (1960), which was subsequently made into a ground-breaking film. But his first sortie into writing was the short story. He started writing for money – ‘certainly there was no question…of my thinking I had anything serious to say’ – but he soon realised that ‘writing insincerely rarely works’. ‘The Search for Tommy Flynn’, initially aired on BBC radio, was his first published work. In all, he produced three volumes of short stories, most set in his fictional town of Cressley. It was a form which fascinated him all his life.

 

In 2000, Stan Barstow left his native Yorkshire with his partner, the radio playwright Diana Griffiths, and went to live in south Wales. He died on 1st August 2011 at Neath. His work has been translated into many languages and is taught in schools and colleges all over the world. He was an honorary MA of the Open University, a Fellow of the RSL and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy.