The son of a coal miner who went on to play professionally in the rugby league, British author David Storey drew heavily on his own background for his debut novel, This Sporting Life, which won the 1960 Macmillan Fiction Award. The collected fiction gathered here includes This Sporting Life as well as his second novel, focusing on a female protagonist, also from a Yorkshire coal mining town. This Sporting Life: In a bleak Yorkshire mining town, an aggressive rugby league footballer finds fame, fortune, and countless women but cannot outrun the emptiness he feels inside. Flight Into Camden: Margaret, a miner's daughter, leaves her oppressive family in Yorkshire, hoping to make a new life in London with a married teacher. Storey's second novel, told in Margaret's voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award.
