WORKING CLASS HERO
Lynsey Stewart profiles William McIlvanney, who remains one of Scotland's most popular literary figures.
Mention miner Tam Docherty
or detective Jack Laidlaw and the name William
McIlvanney will follow suit. These characters
have become as much a household name as their
author. William McIlvanney is one of
Scotland’s most popular literary figures,
with a catalogue of books spanning 30 years. And,
yet again, he is a strong voice at this year's
Edinburgh Book Festival, set to deliver The Post
Office Literary Lecture.
Born in 1936 in Kilmarnock on the West Coast of
Scotland, he was raised on a staple working class
diet of equality and liberty, two principles
which hold true throughout his novels. His first
stab at literary achievement was some poetry when
he was fourteen. However, this flirtation with
"moving words around a piece of paper"
was done only in the safety of his own home.
After leaving
Glasgow University, he became a teacher and wrote
two well-received novels, Remedy is None and A
Gift of Nessus. But it wasn’t until he
turned his hand to writing full-time, in 1975,
that he achieved wide-spread recognition with the
Whitbread Prize winning Docherty, a powerful
social realist novel set in the fictional west of
Scotland town of Graithnock early this century.
McIlvanney looked set to take over as literary
voice of the Scottish people, a position which
James Kelman had been fitted up for.
However, his next novel moved into a completely
different genre – that of crime, featuring a
hard but fair detective called Jack Laidlaw.
This dramatic change was met with high praise as
well as resentment by literary people who
believed he had given up his staunch social
values. The author was unperturbed and Laidlaw
was followed by a second crime novel, The Papers
of Tony Veitch. Over the next 10 years his work
twisted and turned from The Big Man (adapted for
film) to the acclaimed short story collection
Walking Wounded, which won two People’s
Prize Awards from The Herald newspaper. He holds
these dear, since they were awarded by the
readers and not a panel of judges. His last novel
bar one, Strange Novelties (1991) saw a welcome
return to Jack Laidlaw.
In 1996, he returned to the character of Docherty
in The Kiln, a novel five years in the making,
which won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year
Award.Constructed in what he describes as a
"kaleidoscope narrative" rather than a
linear tale, it received celebrity endorsement
from Sean Connery, who described it as "his
best work yet."
McIlvanney himself
said: "I never feel absolutely sure about
these things, but I feel it’s a book
I’ve always wanted to write."
You can see William McIlvanney on Tuesday 25th
August in The Post Office Literary Lecture on I
Hear The Book Is Dying - Come Round And Watch The
Funeral On TV.
The Post Office Theatre
7.30pm
For more
details about the Edinburgh Festival visit
Edinburgh'98 at Beeb@BBC
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