James Kelman

Kelman left school at fifteen for an apprenticeship in the printing trade, then years of factories, buses, and London building sites; in his twenties he joined Philip Hobsbaum's Glasgow writing group alongside Alasdair Gray and Tom Leonard, and his first story collection appeared, improbably, from an American press.

The Busconductor Hines and the Booker-shortlisted A Disaffection built the method: unbroken free-indirect Glaswegian, no narrator standing above the voice. How Late It Was, How Late (1994), Sammy waking blind after a police beating, took the Booker while one judge threatened resignation and columnists counted the swearing.

His acceptance speech answered them: 'My culture and my language have the right to exist.' Kafka and Beckett are his acknowledged kin, and he has kept writing from Glasgow, as far from literary London as ever.