James Kelman
Authors: Hames Scott 
Published: November 2019

James Kelman (b. 1946) is the leading Scottish writer of the post-1960s period and widely known for championing the artistic validity of working-class language. With his fellow Glasgow writers Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard, and Liz Lochhead, he is credited with inspiring a “new renaissance” in Scottish literature in the 1980s and 1990s. Kelman’s influence is strongest and clearest near to home, but his significance is not confined to the Scottish context. His innovative treatment of voice and subjectivity marks a new paradigm in literary realism, an approach driven by his powerful critique of social and linguistic prejudice. Usually viewed as a Scottish, working-class, and neo-modernist writer, Kelman himself locates his work in “two literary traditions, the European Existential and the American Realist.” Whatever disparate labels and comparisons we might attach to this writing—such as “Kafka on the Clyde” or reviewers declaring him “both angrier and funnier than Beckett”—Kelman’s work is strongly grounded in a personal and independent ethical vision. His political ideals and commitments (socialist, anarchist, anticolonial) are inseparable from the fiction, which is frequently centered on the everyday dramas of marginal and isolated characters. Better known than much of his published fiction is Kelman’s lucid and forthright critique of elitist and “colonising” value systems baked into the conventions of standard English literary form. These enforce the (often patronizing or sensationalist) treatment of working-class language and experience from a detached, superior perspective: as “other” to a normative bourgeois viewpoint identified with standard English. Kelman’s distinctive narrative style evades and reverses this effect, granting normative authority to working-class language and experience, and has been followed by a long list of younger Scottish writers including Irvine Welsh, Janice Galloway, and Alan Warner. (His influence is such that postwar Scottish fiction divides itself neatly into pre- and post-Kelman periods; his radicalism has now become a highly respected literary and critical orthodoxy, though without attracting mainstream commercial success.) He was born in Glasgow in 1946 and left school at the earliest opportunity, training as an apprentice compositor (typesetter) aged fifteen, before his family briefly emigrated to California in 1963–1964. On returning to Britain, he worked in a variety of factory and laboring jobs and began writing at age twenty-two. The everyday struggles and mental adventures of working-class men are central to Kelman’s award-winning fiction, which is much funnier than his hard-bitten media image would suggest (an image cemented by the extraordinarily hostile response to Kelman winning the 1994 Booker Prize). His political writing and activism include campaigns against racial injustice and the cruel treatment of victims of industrial disease. For Kelman, “genuine creativity is by its nature subversive; good art can scarcely be anything other than dissident.” Dates and details of individual novels and story collections are listed separately in the first few sections of this article.