The Writers of Wales Database

BILTON, ALAN

Born in York and living in Swansea, Alan graduated from Stirling University in English and Film in 1991. He completed his PhD on ‘Word and Image in The Novels of Don DeLillo’ at the University of Manchester in 1995. Now an academic specialising in silent film, Alan has taught American Literature and Film at the universities of Manchester, Liverpool Hope, and, since 1996, Swansea. His official activities range from showing Chaplin movies to undergraduates, to taking film clips to graduate classes in Spain and the US, and delivering conference papers on silent film and American Literature in Prague, Mississippi, Zaragoza, Rennes, Nicosia, Seattle and Oslo. He has published numerous non-fiction academic titles and is currently writing a book on silent film comedy entitled Constantly Moving Happiness Machines: New Approaches to American Silent Film Comedy.  

Obsessions with train journeys and silent film are Alan Bilton’s childhood legacy, and both are crucial to his first novel, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (Alcemi, 2009), which was nominated for the People's Book Prize in November 2009. The novel features nightmarish train journeys: the anxiety of lateness; losing or merely lugging around luggage; the pressure of packed stations and waiting for loved ones; carriages which are chopped up and fed to a train’s furnace while a bride and groom look on, en route to their honeymoon: all appear or recur in this surreal debut. Alan is a Member of Academi.

Reviews:
With respect to The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (Alcemi, 2009)

 "…A script put together by Franz Kafka, Spike Milligan and Charlie Chaplin at a drunken party to celebrate the twinning of (The League of Gentlemen’s) Royston Vasey with the Gorbals - a welcome addition to Celtic Gothic…" 
Lloyd Jones

"…Alan Bilton’s artfully-interwoven narratives, part zany city guide, part silent film, create an imaginative whole which is poetic, inventive, surprising and pulsating with life…"
DM Thomas, author of The White Hotel


Selected Publications:
An Introduction to Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2002)
The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (Alcemi, 2009)

Contributed to:
America in the 1920s (co-writer) (Helm, 2003)
Sing, Sorrow, Sorrow - Dark and Chilling Tales (contributor) (Seren, 2010)




The Sleepwalkers’ Ball (Alcemi, 2009)

Hans is a dreamer, a waiter, a security guard, a young man tending elderly parents, a layabout, an old man scribbling his memories. Driven out in his pyjamas into a strangely black and white Scottish town, Hans sets off in search of both his girl and the one mysterious thing that will solve the riddle of his life. Clara is the art school girl with the lovely round face and ants in her pants, the crazy girl from the pub, always hindered by luggage or her dodgy innards, the sleepy waitress at the ball in the castle grounds, the blowzy dame with the world’s most beautiful mouth. But can they find each other in time?

Set sometime around now, and yet also any time, this is a beautifully surreal romantic comedy wrapped around the forms of the silent film and the Gothic city ghost tour. A cross between Kafka and Mary Poppins, The Sleepwalkers’ Ball is filmic, funny and lyrical in turns. Always moving, it follows two lives: a man and a woman, and their many attempts to hook up together.

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