Since the publication in 1983 of Not Not while the Giro, his first major collection of short stories, and of his first novel, The Busconductor Hines , in 1984, James Kelman has been one of the most influential--and one of the most controversial--of modern Scottish writers. His stylistic techniques for rendering the consciousness of his solipsistic working-class characters have opened the way for a generation of younger Scottish writers, including Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, and Duncan MacLean, "to write about their own world in the way that they speak." In an interview with MacLean, Kelman said that the problem for working-class and regional writers is

to discover how to talk before we're allowed to write about subjects, and then we think it's surprising that we can't write about certain subjects because we don't have the right voice! They obviously don't realise that language is culture--if you lose your language you've lost...