William Angus McIlvanney was born on 25 November 1936 in Kilmarnock, the youngest of four children of an ex-miner who had taken part in the General Strike of 1926. (His brother Hugh became a distinguished sports journalist.) His father died when McIlvanney was eighteen, an experience reflected in his first novel Remedy is None. He was educated at Kilmarnock Academy and studied English at the University of Glasgow, graduating MA in 1960. The first member of his family to go to university, he ‘became progressively unimpressed … With some very honourable exceptions, I couldn’t accept the mechanistic shallowness of much that was on offer’. He entered teaching, reaching the position of assistant headmaster, but resigned to become a freelance writer in 1975.

McIlvanney’s appreciation of his working-class heritage is a mainspring of his writing. At university he found that none of the texts in his literature course dealt with the working-class life which he knew from his own experience to be rich in character, intelligence and incident. In his own work he has aimed to correct this imbalance, and has been rewarded by reactions like that of an old miner to his novel Docherty: ‘You told my story’. Like other Scottish writers, he was greatly disappointed by the failure of the 1979 devolution referendum and disturbed by the erosion of social idealism in the Thatcherite eighties; and this political unease has given rise to some of his strongest writing: see for instance the essays collected in Surviving the Shipwreck (1991).

As well as publishing novels, short stories and poetry, McIlvanney has had a parallel career in journalism and as a TV presenter. He has held writing fellowships in Scotland and Canada. Among other awards, he received the Whitbread Prize for Fiction for Docherty in 1975, and the Glasgow Herald People’s Prize for his short story collection Walking Wounded in 1990. His novel The Big Man was filmed with Liam Neeson in the title role, and he collaborated in the filming of his short story ‘Dreaming’, shown at film festivals and on television in 1990.