September 11th is the birthday of D.H. Lawrence the great English author, poet, playwright, essayist and literary critic.

David Herbert Lawrence was born in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1930, the fourth child of a barely literate miner and a schoolmistress. His output was both prolific and diverse including novels, plays, short stories, poems, essays, travel books, paintings, translations and literary criticism.

His views on the dehumanising effects of modern life and issues relating to emotional health and human sexuality earned him many enemies and official censorship. At the end of his life he was considered to be a pornographer - largely because of his novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover - who had squandered his talents. It took the critic F.R. Leavis to challenge this and now Lawrence is regarded as a visionary thinker and one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century.

Here at Silksoundbooks we have two audiobooks of Lawrence' work. Love Among the Haystacks and Other Stories read by Geraldine James OBE is a selection of short stories, mostly about women.

Samantha Bond reads Lady Chatterley's Lover, the story of an aristocratic lady's love for her husband’s gamekeeper that outraged the sensibilities of Edwardian England and was not published officialy in England until 1960.