By ROBERT BARR - Associated Press Writer

LONDON - Stanley Middleton, a prolific novelist who shared the prestigious Booker Prize in 1974, has died of cancer, his family said.

Middleton died in Nottingham in central England on July 25, a week short of his 90th birthday.

Nearly all of Middleton's 44 novels were based in Nottingham, though he often called the town "Beechnall." He was born in Nottingham, took his university degree in the city, and taught English at High Pavement school in the city from 1947 to 1981, heading the department for 23 years.

His experiences in the army in India were the basis for one novel. His latest book, "Her Three Wise Men," was published last year.

A voracious reader as a teenager, Middleton said the most powerful influence on him was D.H. Lawrence, "who opened my eyes to the possibility that a major author could write about the sort of life I saw around me, using my own dialect and describing places that I had seen with my own eyes."

Middleton was 38 when he published his first novel, "A Short Answer," but then produced a new book nearly every year afterward.

"Holiday," which shared the Booker Prize with Nadine Gordimer's "The Conservationist," told of a man struggling with the death of his son and the decay of his marriage.

Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publications, which has reprinted "Holiday," noted that Middleton's novels "were never exciting, trendy, cutting edge."

"Rather they were solid novels about people who lived relatively ordinary lives in ordinary streets. That was their strength," Bradshaw said.

In his novel "Small Change" (1970), one of Middleton's characters comments about reading a novel about a farmer who "milked his cows; he had once to call in the vet; he had to struggle on with the flu; his wife had a hysterectomy; he worried about the present state of farming; his only son won a place in the town grammar school."

Perhaps critics would find such a book more acceptable, Middleton wrote, "if the writer had set the same dull stuff in the Dordogne and Tuscany or Zimbabwe," but the character felt "privileged to share or empathize with the not-very-out-of-the-ordinary life of the sort of man I'll see next time I walk out of the village."

Middleton was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1998. In 1982 he was awarded a Judith E. Wilson Fellowship in Poetry at Cambridge University.

He is survived by Margaret, his wife of 57 years, and their daughters, Penni and Sarah.

His funeral will be held Monday at Ravensworth Road Methodist Church in Nottingham, where Middleton frequently served as organist.