BRYAN Ely, who gave you that freedom to to write as you are?
ELY Oh… Jim Kelman was was not the first book in Scots that I had actually read, but for some reason Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting actually passed me by. I think I felt because it was East coast Scots. It didn’t. It didn’t click for me that this was in Scots, but it was when I went to college, or was it a night class? A creative writing night class. And the tutor gave me a book that was How Late It Was, How Late by Jim Kelman. She said, “I think you identify with this.” And I’m like, “okay,” I still don’t know what I was, why she gave me it. But it’s a great book. And I thought, “oh, you’re allowed to write the way that you talk?” So and I had a wee shot of sort of trying to write in Scots after that, but it didn’t… It wasn’t quite right for me, cause I was trying to write about what Jim was writing about. He was writing about somebody that’s an alcoholic, and that wasn’t my experience. And he was writing about masculinity and stuff like that. So it took me a wee while to… But definitely Jim’s stuff, Matthew Fitt, Anne Donovan, Alan Bissett, all these people.
Description
Ely Percy talks about the writers who inspired them to become a writer on BBC Authors Live. Ely is the author of Duck Feet, a novel on the National 5 English set texts list.
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