James Kelman
Photo Credit: Angus Bremner
James Kelman was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1989 with A Disaffection, which also won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He went on to win the Booker Prize five years later with How Late It Was, How Late, before being shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2009 and 2011. Both Dirt Road and That Was a Shiver were shortlisted for the Saltire Fiction Book of the Year in 2016 and 2017.
Dirt Road
From the Booker Prize-winning James Kelman, ‘Dirt Road is about coming of age, grief and the folk music of the American deep south’ Daily Telegraph
“People would see me coming and know who I was, who I was not and so what if I had those blue eyes? Some blue eyes are different.”
That Was a Shiver, and Other Stories
‘I’ll die at the desk. So what, where’s the coffee? Forty-five years after that first collection of stories here I go with another. Ye cannay beat that feeling man it’s beautiful. A new collection of stories! What a marvel.’ James Kelman on the writing life is a braw thing indeed.
Guardian
“The truth is he didn't care how long he was going away. Forever would have suited him. It didn't matter it was America. America was good but wherever. Things closed in. It was not Dad’s fault, just life”
“In Dirt Road we see [Kelman] continuing to show how human experience can be energised and renewed by its modest scale, not flattened by it into a stereotype. It is another masterpiece from one of our best writers.”
Kirsty Gunn
Guardian