{"id":362502,"date":"2025-08-21T16:43:16","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T16:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/362502\/"},"modified":"2025-08-21T16:43:16","modified_gmt":"2025-08-21T16:43:16","slug":"edinburgh-international-book-festival-james-kelman-your-stories-are-your-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/362502\/","title":{"rendered":"Edinburgh International Book Festival: James Kelman: Your Stories are Your Own"},"content":{"rendered":"

James Kelman<\/strong> is Glaswegian through and through.\u00a0 Born and bred in Govan and Drumchapel, he has always been committed to giving voice \u2013 their own voice \u2013 to the Scottish working classes. <\/p>\n

He\u2019s been published since the 1970s, and is a prolific writer of short stories, essays and novels. In 1994 he won the Booker Prize with How Late It Was, How Late, the story of a shoplifter who is beaten up by plain clothes policemen and wakes up to find himself blind. The book was a highly controversial choice, causing one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, to call it \u2018crap\u2026deeply inaccessible to a lot of people\u2019 and its win \u2018a disgrace\u2019, which allegations Kelman countered with,<\/p>\n

\n

My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that right.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This week Kelman was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to talk about The Story of the Stone,<\/strong> a new collection of short fiction, and All We have is the Story: Selected Interviews 1973-2022. <\/strong>Chair Dr Scott Hames<\/strong> wrote his PhD on Kelman; all this publishing, he jokes, is diluting his work no end.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Story and style have always been central to Kelman\u2019s work. When friends lent him books and asked if he enjoyed them, he could never separate the story from the writing,<\/p>\n

\n

A writer is a maker. I outgrew writers who didn\u2019t work on the basics; the teller of the story tells the story; they should never throw a pile of words at people and say \u201cmake your own story,\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He grew up in a family full of stories. His Gaelic-speaking grandmother \u2018lived and breathed the tradition\u2019 in which everyone told stories and ballads. \u00a0At school she was punished for speaking in Gaelic; he regrets the fact that he and his brothers made fun of her,<\/p>\n

\n

\u2026the laugh was on us because we never learned the language\u2026imperialists told us not to value our own family<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Later Kelman and his friends were similarly punished for speaking in the Glaswegian they used on the street at school.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As a young writer, he says, he was banned from telling stories about his \u2018ordinary\u2019 background; such stories were only acceptable if written from the outside \u2018like a social worker.\u2019 \u00a0Starting work at the age of 15 in a printing factory, he heard the men around him telling amazing stories all day, often with very inventive use of the F word, but he realised that he could not tell their stories to his friends, the stories did not exist without the men who told them, and the men did not exist outwith the factory.<\/p>\n

Kelman has a lifelong interest in fonts and typography; as an apprentice compositor he learned to study the page, to judge not only words but spaces. One of his tasks was to insert slivers of lead between the words and remove them after printing. He still likes to explore different fonts for different stories.<\/p>\n

When he started to write short fiction he needed the freedom to do what he wanted to do,<\/p>\n

\n

And what I wanted was a story<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Publishers, he says, always want to impose uniformity on a writer, but the voice changes from character to character. If it didn\u2019t<\/p>\n

\n

How would the characters breathe? How would I breathe?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And if a character can\u2019t breathe, they won\u2019t come alive on the page. He began to write without using speech marks or any indicators of dialogue, he wanted to retain ambiguity, to remove the barriers between a character\u2019s inner and outer world. This, he says, was the only way he could create stories from within a character\u2019s psyche; he didn\u2019t want any distinction between their voice and the narrator\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Kelman has always fought the literary establishment, always used the language he grew up with. When the printer of one of his first collections wanted him to rewrite his very first story (about an old man in the printing factory) removing all the swear words, he removed the story instead and wrote another one,<\/p>\n

\n

There was no story without the language. You have to have that honesty.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A young writer, he says, needs to find their own speaking voice and not be hampered by the rules they are taught in school. They must accept that their very best writing will still be attacked or ignored, will fail to attract the attention they expected. \u2018You just need to hope that other artists will at least appreciate it.\u2019<\/p>\n

He\u2019s always been attracted to the writing of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka; art is also a huge influence, particularly Cezanne and Rodin \u2013 as a teenager he was more interested in visual arts and writers from other cultures. He\u2019s immensely well read and well informed; the entire session is crammed with references to ideas, radical history, philosophy and literature, but he has always wanted his stories to be, above all, self-referential, for everything to be there on the page, just as it should be in a painting. People shouldn\u2019t have to bring anything to either form unless they want to,<\/p>\n

\n

The thing is dead until a person is looking at it or reading it; the relationship between that person\u2019s self and the work of art is where that thing exists.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kelman says he\u2019s \u2018beyond anger\u2019 and now simply \u2018mystified\u2019 as to how politics have moved towards the right in recent times.<\/p>\n

\n

What the hell happened here?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bloody Sunday, the miners\u2019 strike, Thatcher. The 1979 race riots in Southall.\u00a0 People over 50 (he\u2019s now 79) thought things were on a constant upward trajectory, but \u2018it was a misunderstanding of how history functions.\u2019 Despite all the radical work that took place in the 19th century, \u2018here we are.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

An audience member asks about Kelman\u2019s editing process; are editors brave enough to challenge his work?<\/p>\n

His answers gives rise to much laughter,<\/p>\n

\n

It\u2019s very difficult with editors.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In fact, he says, he revises all the time and finds it hard to finish anything; he has a store of hundreds of unfinished stories.<\/p>\n

On 31 July 2025, the Scottish Languages Bill, giving official status to Gaelic and Scots languages and making changes to support them in Scotland, was enacted at Holyrood. How will this affect things?<\/p>\n

Kelman replies that he has not been published in the UK since 2012; his current publisher is a small left wing press in the US,<\/p>\n

\n

There is a continuous push to sanitise language as it is used by ordinary people.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He thinks some Scots writers have been too timid, and it infuriates him that Glaswegian is described as slang. It\u2019s a language, derived from West coast Gaelic and Norse.<\/p>\n

\n

If you are not allowed to use your language then your culture is dead. This is happening all around the world; African and Asian languages are being killed just as Gaelic was when I was a child.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the 1970s Kelman attended Philip Hobshaum\u2019s creative writing group; other members included Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and Alasdair Gray. I recall last seeing Gray on the stage at EIBF for a tribute to one of the founders of Canongate Books, Stephanie Wolfe Murray. Each contributor was allocated a 5 minute slot. Gray was still talking 10 minutes later, unbothered by Jamie Byng\u2019s increasingly frantic hand signals. Hames, who has had precious little to do in Kelman\u2019s hour-long stream of consciousness, is now faced with a similar problem; Kelman has so much to say, about writing, politics, history and so much more, and there are still many audience questions to be answered. Eventually Hames does manage to bring the session to a close, but only on the basis that people can continue to chat with Kelman in the festival bookshop.<\/p>\n

An uncompromising supporter of the language, culture and truths of \u2018ordinary\u2019 people, of community, artistic freedom and above all, the story, James Kelman remains one of Scotland\u2019s most important writers,<\/p>\n

\n

whose strange, new sentences are brilliant adventures in thought<\/p>\n

James Wood, The New Yorker, August 2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

James Kelman\u2019s The Story of the Stone: Tales, Entreaties, and Incantations: 6 and All We Have is the Story: Selected Interviews (1973-2022) are published by PM Press.<\/p>\n

Edinburgh International Book Festival continues until Sunday 24 August. Authors yet to come include Kirsty Logan, Richard Holloway, Irvine Welsh, Kit de Waal, Naga Munchetty and Ian McEwan; for details visit https:\/\/www.edbookfest.co.uk\/the-festival\/whats-on
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