David Storey (1933-2017)

David Rhames Storey is an English playwright, screenwriter, award-winning novelist and a former professional rugby league player.

Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and educated at QEGS Wakefield and at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, his plays include The Restoration of Arnold Middleton, The Changing Room, Cromwell, Home and Stages.

Storey was a trumpet player who wrote the screenplay for This Sporting Life (1963), directed by Lindsay Anderson, adapted from Storey's 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 starring Sir Ralph Richardson) were made into television films.

Storey's 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.

Have confidence that if you have done a little thing well, you can do a bigger thing well too.