Booker Prize winner James Kelman says Scottish writers 'too timid' because they are 'made to feel bitter'
Booker Prize winner James Kelman was speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Scottish writers are “too timid” because they are made to feel bitter and as if they cannot let go of the past, Booker Prize winning author James Kelman has warned.
Glasgow-born Mr Kelman, who won the Booker in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, told an audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival the “depth” of Scottish language and culture had been “destroyed by an imperial force”.
Mr Kelman said his work is no longer published in the UK, which he said was indicative of the situation surrounding Scottish culture. He said at the event on Sunday that he believed Scottish writers were too timid because they were made to feel "bitter" or as if they could not forget history.
In response to a question from an audience member about the future of Scots and Gaelic in literature following the passing of the Scottish Languages Bill last month, Mr Kelman said: “I’m not sure how it’s going to go. I'm no longer published here, so you can say that how things have been over the last ten years is reflected in the speaker today. I've not been published in England since 2012.”
Mr Kelman said his work was now published by a small, left-wing press in the US.
He said: “There’s a continual push to sanitise ordinary language as it’s used by ordinary people. Nothing’s changed in that sense. Sometimes I do feel as if some Scottish writers are being too timid. Sometimes it’s because they’re always made to feel as if they’re bitter or ‘why don’t you forget about that?’.
“Or as though you’re going to confuse the British bourgeoisie with being English or something. It’s like ‘no, we’re past that really’. We had these issues in the mid 18th century, we can go beyond that.”
Mr Kelman added: “The issue with language is if you're not allowed to use a language in your culture, then it's dead. That’s what’s happened across the world just now. How many languages have been destroyed in, say, the African continent and parts of Asia? How many languages were just killed and destroyed and not allowed?”
He referred to a previous anecdote about his Gaelic-speaking grandmother, whom he says he mocked as a child.
“The glaring example is my grandmother and how as kids we all made a fool of it,” he said. “When I was a kid, Gaelic speakers were ridiculed. That’s not long ago. You can’t explore your own language.”
The Booker Prize winner gave the example of “Glasgow slang”, citing words such as “polis” and “huis”, which come from Norse origins.
He said he had started to spell the word “huis” with “uis” in his writing.
“My editor said ‘you can’t spell it that way, it’s hoose’. He said ‘that’s Glasgow slang’.
“You have to remember, the so-called Glasgow slang is actually different forms of Gaelic and it’s also Norse. It’s so glaringly Norse. Why the hell are we always being told that ‘dour’ is slang? That ‘polis’ is slang? All of the words we know are actually Norse.
“[Look at] the depth of language, the depth of culture that has been destroyed of us by an imperial force.”
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