An evening with James Kelman

We're over the moon to be tying up this year's Radical Book Fair in the company of a true Scottish legend of words and vision. James Kelman has spent a lifetime fighting for the underdog, bringing working-class stories to readers and championing sidelined voices, from Glasgow to Kurdistan.

We look forward to an evening exploring the mind and interests of this great novelist, short-story writer, essayist and thinker, picking up on highlights from his recent stories (God's Teeth and Other Phenomena), his essays written alongside Noam Chomsky (Between Thought And Expression Lies A Lifetime), and the upcoming collection of essays The State is Your Enemy, to be published late in November.

Our speaker:

James Kelman was born in Glasgow in 1946 and left school in 1961, moving around  and working in various jobs. He started writing at the age of twenty-one: ramblings, musings, sundry phantasmagoria, stories, whatever. In London 1969 he met and married Marie Connors from South Wales and later returned to Glasgow. In 1972 he met the Texan writer Mary Gray Hughes. With Mary Gray’s support his debut story collection An Old Pub Near The Angel was published in Orono, Maine, USA. Most of his writings are now out of print in the United Kingdom. The US-based publisher PM Press has contracted to publish his new work and to reprint, where available, his earlier novels. The film of his novel, Dirt Road (to Lafayette) is now available in digital form. Kelman's latest books are Between Thought & Expression Lies a Lifetime (with Noam Chomsky; essays and correspondence); God's Teeth & Other Phenomena (novel); The State is the Enemy: Essays on Liberation and Racial Justice. A collection of new and revised stories, Keep Moving and No Questions, is scheduled early in 2023. He and Marie still live in Glasgow, not far from their two daughters and two grandchildren.

Our Host:

Calum Barnes is a bookseller and writer based in Edinburgh. His writing has appeared in Tribune, The Quietus, and 3AM Magazine.