David Storey, the British playwright, screenwriter and Booker prize-winning novelist, has died at the age of 83.



Storey was best known for his visceral debut novel, This Sporting Life (1960), which was based on his experiences as a professional rugby league player. He adapted it for an acclaimed 1963 film starring Richard Harris and directed by Lindsay Anderson, with whom Storey enjoyed a vital creative partnership.

The book begins in the thick of a rugby match – “I had my head to Mellor’s backside, waiting for the ball to come between his legs” – and the protagonist, Arthur Machin, has his front teeth broken on the first page. The scene was directly inspired by an incident when Storey was playing rugby for Leeds as a teenager; he hesitated and another player “came up with a very bloody mouth, not knowing what had happened to his teeth … The guilt induced by that was enormous.”

The son of a miner, Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, and attended the city’s Queen Elizabeth grammar school. He made a name for himself alongside a wave of working-class writers from Yorkshire including Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving) and John Braine (Room at the Top) who shared a similarly frank, realistic approach.

Richard Harris in This Sporting Life. Photograph: ITV/Rex/Shutterstock

Storey went on to study at the Slade School of Art in London. His second novel, Flight into Camden, traced the story of a miner’s daughter who falls in love with a married teacher and goes to live with him in north London. It won Storey the 1963 Somerset Maugham award. His plays included The Changing Room (1973), which is set over the course of a rugby match, seen from a locker-room perspective. He frequently drew upon his Yorkshire background throughout his later works and won the Booker prize in 1976 for Saville, which follows a mining family from the late 1930s onwards.

Anderson directed Storey’s elegiac 1970 play Home, set in a mental institution, at the Royal Court in London and on Broadway. He also filmed a version for the BBC’s Play for Today strand with the same cast, led by John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. The writer and director also collaborated on stage and screen productions of Storey’s In Celebration (1969), starring Alan Bates and Brian Cox. That play – about three brothers reuniting for their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary – was revived in the West End in 2007 with a cast including Orlando Bloom in his stage debut.

Storey’s 1976 play Mother’s Day opened at the Court to poor reviews and became famous for an encounter between the playwright and the critics. “Storey lay in wait for us on our next visit and proceeded to remonstrate,” remembered Michael Billington. “I was singled out for a hearty cuff round the ears, which was reported in the press as if I’d been savagely felled by a blow from Muhammad Ali.”

In recent years, Storey had returned to painting and drawing. An exhibition entitled A Tender Tumult, featuring more than 400 works, was held at the Hepworth in Wakefield in 2016.



Storey’s wife, Barbara Hamilton, died in 2015. A statement from their four children said: “He gave and inspired great love, drew us out and showed us how the world really is.”



Playwrights paid tribute to Storey on Twitter. David Eldridge called him “a giant of postwar theatre” and wrote: “Read him and understand some of what it is to write theatre.” Jack Thorne called him “a master theatrical architect and storyteller … A true true great.” The poet Ian McMillan tweeted that “This Sporting Life spoke directly to the Yorkshire soul”.

