How Late it Was How Late – James Kelman Wins The Booker Prize 1994
James Kelman should have won the Booker for A Disaffection, but his acceptance speech for the Booker in 1994 is a seminal moment in Scottish cultural/political history.
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Why don’t we get to hear Kelmans acceptance speech when you call it that?
His speech is at the end of the film?
Spontaneous applause in my living room for that acceptance speech.
@Cathy Gunn, in attempting to reconstruct what James Kelman might have said in that acceptance speech but didn’t (maybe he was hoping to be invited again), I found that his 1992 collection of essays Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political is apparently still out of print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Recent_Attacks
Why, in this day and age, should that be? Not even an e-book or free transcript online?
you can still get . . . and the judges said, by James K. A fine choice for the dark nights.
I appreciate the way the video opened with the sordid aspect of betting on the winner. What is the bookmaking model of the literary novel? Is it now being replaced by AI literary critics? Or perhaps like other art critics, these can be simply generated by algorithm, like psychiatrists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
which will provide the adversarial trainers for AI novelists.
It’s autosatirical how these gatekeepers fail at becoming tastemakers.
What does it mean to say X “should have won” Y award for Z? Isn’t that taking the system (much) too literally? What was remarkable about Kelman’s acceptance speech? He’s anti-imperial… and?
In retrospect, a very impressive Booker shortlist, although not seen as such at the time. George Mackay Brown’s Beside the Ocean of Time also an important contribution to Orcadian/Scottish literature.
I read ‘A Disaffection’ soon after it was published in 1989, when I was working as a teacher in a working class comprehensive. I did not think much of it and forgot about it. Recently, I re-read it. I was even less impressed.