Book description
Rugby League football in an industrial northern city
circa
1960 is a life of grime, mud, sweat, intrigue and naked ambition. In
This Sporting Life
, David Storey recounts the fortunes of gladiator hero Arthur Machin
from the day of his inclusion in the local team to the match when he
begins to feel age creeping up on him. Through Arthur we are taken into
his raw, often brutal world of players, backers, Saturday crowds bloody
noses and broken teeth, landladies and communal baths. David Storey
was born in 1933 in Wakefield, and studied at the Slade School of Art.
He is the author of fifteen plays and eleven novels, most recently
The Thin-Ice Skater
(2004). He has won many prizes, including the Macmillan Fiction Award,
the Somerset Maugham Award, the Faber Memorial Prize and, in 1976, the
Booker Prize for Saville
. He now lives in London
