Sid Chaplin (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 '50s.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.