Name Tom Hanlin Language English Role Fiction writer | Nationality British Died 1953 Books Once in Every Lifetime | |
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Born 28 August 1907Armadale, West Lothian ( 1907-08-28 ) | ||
Tom Hanlin (28 August 1907 – 7 April 1953) was a Scottish fiction writer, known for writing a number of novels which were influential and sold widely.
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Life
Hanlin was born in Armadale, West Lothian on 28 August 1907. At the age of 14 he left school and worked on a farm for a year, then got a job at a mine where he worked for the next twenty years. While working as a miner he began to study at a journalism school in Glasgow. After a workplace accident in 1945, he spent three months in the Royal Infirmary, and he began to write stories and sell them, thus realising his childhood dream.
Hanlin died at home on 7 April 1953, after developing heart and breathing problems.
Writing
During his lifetime, Hanlin wrote over thirty short stories, several novels and essays, and eight radio plays, two of which were broadcast. Once in Every Lifetime, published in 1945, was his most popular novel, selling 250,000 copies in the United Kingdom in the first three weeks of publication. It also won the £500 first prize in the Big Ben Books Competition, and was translated into more than a dozen languages.
Once in Every Lifetime was serialised in Woman's Home Companion, and a radio version was later broadcast on BBC Radio. Norman Collins, writing in the Observer, wrote that "his novel is an idyll of young love that somehow became sour and unlovely amid the grim landscape of the pitheads. It is brief, moving in places, almost unbearably so, and often beautiful. In short Mr. Hanlin is a remarkable fellow." John Steinbeck also spoke enthusiastically of the author, declaring the book "excellent."
In his writing Hanlin draws on the themes of love and religion, but always in the context of the gritty realism and poverty of life in a small mining town. The Scotsman review of The Miracle at Cardenrigg notes "Tom Hanlin uses a miraculously averted pit disaster to bring into sharp focus the life of a Scottish mining community and to present his Catholic and predominantly tragic view of earthly life."