All About Scotland

His most successful works focus on working-class life and make heavy use of urban Scots dialect and consequently he is often regarded as a forerunner of the likes of James Kelman and Irvine Welsh. His most significant novel, Docherty won the 1975 Whitbread prize for fiction. He switched from literary to popular fiction thereafter, producing a trilogy of crime novels featuring the maverick detective, Jack Laidlaw, and followed these with The Big Man, a realistic portrait of the brutal world of bare-knuckle boxing. McIlvanney has also produced several volumes of poetry, a non-fiction study of Glasgow and a collection of his journalism.