Born in Glasgow and still living there, James Kelman has won numerous prizes for his writing, including the Cheltenham Prize for Greyhound for Breakfast, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for A Dissaffection, and most notably the Booker Prize for How Late it Was, How Late.
Kelman has had a huge impact on the direction of Scottish fiction. The movement towards social realism, which is strongly influenced by his approach, has spawned some fine writers as well as some Kelmanqués, and has provided a challenging counterpoint to the Brigadoon tosh that tends to spread, invasive as bracken, through Scottish culture. For all that he can be extremely funny, James Kelman, is a writer with a serious purpose, whose depth of concern with moral and political issues means that he never stereotypes experience of poverty, boredom or violence. His humour might be in your face, but it's never lacking in subtlety. In Kelman's world, conventional icons of respectability deserve no knee-jerk respect and, in fact, they are exposed as being tools of social manipulation and control.
He has been jointly awarded the Stakis Prize for Scottish Writer of the Year 1998 for his most recent book