You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Sulfurblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guest is James Kelman, author of How Late, published in America by Norton.

It's the winner of the 1994 Booker Prize.

And I wanted to begin by asking you, is this book your work considered radical work in Scottish, modern Scottish literature?

It is now more. It's taken a bit of time, I think, for people to work out what was actually happening.

You know, that

worked by the selects of myself or the poet Tom Leonard.

And, you know, it's been difficult for maybe for people to see a context, and it's taken

a while, really.

I think it's, and it also took people a while to see that there may have been something of formal interest in it.

And that actually pertains to what occurred after the Booker Prize Award. Some of the elitism and incredible bias against my work is similar to what happened earlier on when I was writing.

Now, because you write of a subject matter that some people in society would consider to be

of the lower orders, they think therefore that it's impossible for anything written about them

or about the lower or within the lower orders to have literary merit. Now even in this novel

I would still be asked by people if whether a revise. Now I was asked that after a disaffection won

another literary award in five years ago.

And one of the judges in there who awards the prize take myself my wife for a meal, you know,

and he said, do you ever revise?

...