David Storey dies, aged 83

Booker prize-winner David Storey, author of This Sporting Life (Vintage), has died aged 83. 

Storey was a novelist, playwright and screenwriter, best known for his 1960 debut, This Sporting Life, about Rugby League football, set in a Northern industrial city and based on his own experiences as a professional rugby player. The book won the Macmillan Fiction Award and was adapted into a film of the same name in 1963.

Storey went on to win the Booker in 1976 for Saville, a novel that also drew on his Yorkshire working-class background, about a boy growing up in a Yorkshire mining village during WW2. 

He also wrote Flight into Camden, winner of the 1961 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and 1963 Somerset Maugham Prize for fiction, and Pasmore, awarded Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 1973, as well as plays The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, The Contractor, Home, In Celebration and The Changing Room.

Dan Franklin, associate publisher at Jonathan Cape, told The Bookseller Storey was "a delightful man". He worked with the author on one of his very last novels, A Serious Man, published in 1998, an experience he said had been a "privilege". 

A spokesperson for his four children said: "Dad died peacefully with his family around him. He gave and inspired great love, drew us out and showed us how the world really is."