Award-Winning Novelist, David Storey, Dies at Age 83

English playwright, screenwriter and award-winning novelist, David Malcolm Storey died on March 27 at the age of 83.

Storey was born on 13 July 1933 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire. He was the son of a coal miner, Frank Richmond Storey, and Lily (née Cartwright) Storey. He was educated at QEGS Wakefield. He continued his education at London's Slade School of Fine Art, and supported himself there by playing rugby for Leeds RLFC (now Leeds Rhinos) where he played half-back for the A-team, with occasional appearances with the first.His plays include Home, The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, The Changing Room, Cromwell, Home, and Stages. His novels include Flight into Camden, which won the 1963 Somerset Maugham Award; and the 1961 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; and Saville, which won the 1976 Booker Prize.

He wrote the screenplay for This Sporting Life (1963), directed by Lindsay Anderson, adapted from his first novel of the same name, originally published in 1960, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award. The film was the beginning of a long professional association with Anderson, whose film version of Storey's play In Celebration was released as part of the American Film Theatre series in 1975. Home and Early Days (both starred Sir Ralph Richardson; Home starred Sir John Gielgud) were made into television films.

In 1956, Storey married Barbara Rudd Hamilton, by whom he had four children. Barbara Hamilton died in 2015.