A crofter’s son living on the remote island of Norday escapes into the limitless world of his imagination, in George Mackay Brown’s lyrical saga
The Booker Prize 1994
Another vintage controversy when James Kelman’s win with his profanity-laden How Late It Was, How Late loosed a few profanities itself among tender-souled readers and reviewers.
Kelman was Scotland’s first Booker Prize winner – having been shortlisted in 1989 for A Disaffection – although one of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, dissociated herself from the win, pronouncing the book ‘a disgrace’.
Kelman himself thought the negative publicity made publishers wary of his future books but defended the ripe language as being a true reflection of regional argot: ‘Every time they [Glaswegians] opened their mouth out came a stream of gobbledygook. Beautiful!’
Watch the ceremony
How Late It Was, How Late
Winner of The Booker Prize 1994
- By
- James Kelman
- Published by
- Secker & Warburg
James Kelman’s raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world is given voice by Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting
The shortlist
Romesh Gunesekera's debut novel is a haunting coming-of-age story set against a background of social unrest and a fast-disappearing paradise
An African boy comes of age in an East Africa increasingly corrupted by colonialism and violence, in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s powerful historical fiction
Alan Hollinghurst’s 1995 novel is an enigmatic tale of obsession, mystery, lust and loss
James Kelman’s raw, wry vision of human survival in a bureaucratic world is given voice by Sammy, an ex-convict with a penchant for shoplifting
By James Kelman
Jill Paton Walsh’s intriguing philosophical fable, set on a fictitious Mediterranean island in medieval Europe
