SOURCE: "Booker Prize Winner Defends His Language," in The New York Times, November 29, 1994, pp. B1-B2.

[In the essay below, Lyall comments on the controversy surrounding the Booker committee's decision to award Kelman the 1994 prize. She also discusses the impact of the prize on Kelman's life and relates his views on writing, literature, England, and the Scottish language.]

No sooner had James Kelman's novel How Late It Was, How Late won this year's Booker Prize for fiction than a full scale furor erupted. One of the judges, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, declared that the book was unreadably bad and said that the awarding of the prize, Britain's most important, was a "disgrace." Simon Jenkins, a conservative columnist for The Times of London, called the award "literary vandalism." Several other critics sniped that the book should have been disqualified because of its heavy use of profanity.

Meanwhile, the British literary...