Sid Chaplin

Sid Chaplin
Born	20 September 1916 23 Bolckow Street, Shildon, County Durham
Died	11 January 1986 (aged 69) Ferryhill, County Durham
Occupation	novelist, essayist, screenwriter
Language	English
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Notable works	The Day of the Sardine, The Watchers and the Watched

Sid Chaplin OBE (20 September 1916 – 11 January 1986) was an English writer whose works (novels, television screenplays, poetry and short stories) are mostly set in the North East England of the 1940s and 1950s.

Chaplin was born into a Durham mining family and worked in pits as a teenager. In 1946 he won the Atlantic Award for Literature for his collection of short stories, The Leaping Lad. After another stint as a miner, Chaplin began writing full-time for the National Coal Board magazine from 1950. He later wrote for The Guardian, including theatre reviews, essays of social observation and, from 1963, his own column Northern Accent.

Chaplin's literary career pre-dated the so-called angry young men genre and has been credited as an influence on the late 1950s/early 1960s "kitchen sink" social realism of writers such as Alan Sillitoe and Stan Barstow. His 1961-2 novels The Day of the Sardine and The Watchers and the Watched have been cited as classics of "working class existentialism" and were reprinted by Flambard Press in 2004.

In 1968, playwright Alan Plater based his play and musical production Close The Coalhouse Door on Chaplin's early writings, set to songs by Alex Glasgow. The musical was revived in 2012. In 1976 Chaplin contributed to the writing of the TV series When The Boat Comes In. The following year he was awarded an OBE for services to the arts in the North East.

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