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.
One judge, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, called the book “crap” and, threatening to resign from the panel, said it would win “over [her] dead body”. When it did, British broadsheets questioned the legitimacy of the prize with outraged headlines such as “How Unreadable It Was, How Unreadable” and “Isn't it time to close the book on this farce?” Journalists counted the number of swear-words in the book; Blake Morrison estimated that “fuck” appeared 4,000 times. In the Times Simon Jenkins launched into a furious invective, labelling Kelman an “illiterate savage”, his win an act of “literary vandalism” and the novel the ramblings of a “blind Glaswegian drunk”. Kelman, eschewing a dinner jacket for a suit and tie, gave a speech at the award dinner calling the sneering criticisms of his style tantamount to racism: “A fine line can exist between elitism and racism,” he said. “On matters concerning language and culture, the distance can sometimes cease to exist altogether.”
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