At 72, the writer James Kelman has published nine novels, 13 short story collections, two essay collections and several plays. He has been compared to Beckett, Kafka and Joyce, and labelled the “greatest living British novelist”.
But to some, what Kelman does is not literature at all. In 1994, he won the Booker Prize for his fourth novel, How Late It Was, How Late, the tale of Sammy, an ex-con beaten to blindness by plain-clothes police (“sodjers”, in Glaswegian dialect), and his subsequent attempts to navigate the hostile and unavoidable limbs of the state. It is a brilliant, inventive book, full of jet-black humour. It is also the most controversial winner in the prize’s 50-year history, provoking a violent response that went beyond questions of merit.
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