Jeff Torrington (31 December 1935 – 11 May 2008) was a novelist from Glasgow in Scotland.
His novels draw on the changing face of modern Scotland. Swing Hammer Swing (1992) was set during the demolition of the old Gorbals. It took 30 years to write. The Devil's Carousel (1998) drew on the decline of a fictionalised version of the Rootes/Chrysler car plant at Linwood. Torrington worked there for eight years, as a telex sequencer, before the plant's closure.
Swing Hammer Swing was Whitbread Book of the Year in 1992.
Torrington's first published stories appeared in newspapers. He later attended a Paisley writers' group set up by James Kelman and a creative writing group in Glasgow associated with Philip Hobsbaum, which also included Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Aonghas MacNeacail.
References
- ^ "Swing Hammer Swing, blow by blow". The Herald. Glasgow. 1 February 1993. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
- Linklater, John (12 April 1996). "Custom-built model". The Herald. Glasgow. Retrieved 13 October 2018.
- Kravitz, Peter (1997). The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction. Picador. p. xvii. ISBN 0330335502.
External links
- Obituary: The Guardian
- Obituary: The Herald
- Obituary: Scotsman
- Obituary: Telegraph
- Obituary: Times
- Obituary: Independent
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- 1935 births
- 2008 deaths
- Scottish novelists
- Costa Book Award winners
- Writers from Glasgow
- Neurological disease deaths in Scotland
- Deaths from Parkinson's disease in the United Kingdom
- 20th-century Scottish novelists
- Scottish male novelists
- Scottish short story writers
- 20th-century Scottish male writers
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