How Late It Was, How Late

Winner: The Booker Prize 1994
Published by Secker & Warburg: 28 March 1994

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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

One Sunday morning in Glasgow, Sammy awakens in a lane and tries to remember the two-day drinking binge that landed him there. Things only get worse. Sammy gets into a fight with some soldiers, lands in jail, and discovers that he is completely blind. His girlfriend disappears, the police probe him endlessly, and his stab at Disability Compensation embroils him in the Kafkaesque red tape of the welfare system.

James Kelman

James Kelman was born in Glasgow. His novel How Late It Was, How Late won the Booker Prize 1994

More about James Kelman

How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman changed my life. It is such a bold book, the prose and stream of consciousness is really inventive. But it is also one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page

Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize Q&A, 2020

Writers reading writers

Damon Galgut on James Kelman's How late It Was, How Late

2021 Booker Prize-shortlisted Damon Galgut, author of The Promise, on why he loves Kelman’s 1994 winner How Late It Was, How Late.

Watch the 1994 ceremony

The Booker Prize 1994 - Full Ceremony | The Booker Prize

Watch the 1994 Booker Prize full ceremony, in which James Kelman wins the prize with How Late It Was, How Late and Abdulrazak Gurnah is nominated with Paradise