Glasgow gangster turned writer Jimmy Boyle: ‘I would be dead now without books'

The convicted murderer set the standard for prison writing with A Sense of Freedom in 1977. As it is republished, he talks about honour, violence and redemption as a novelist and sculptor

When the Gorbals hard man sat down in Barlinnie jail in 1976 and wrote the story of his life, he can little have imagined that it would become a bestseller, a film and, 40 years later, be reprinted as a classic of prison literature. Even less could he have dreamed that, by then, he would be a world-renowned sculptor living between Marrakech and the French Riviera with his actor wife, having moved from his home in Edinburgh 15 years earlier, not least to avoid being forever known as “Scotland’s most violent criminal” and to escape an unforgiving Scottish tabloid press that seemed to resent his success.

Yet that is what happened to Jimmy Boyle. When it was first published, A Sense of Freedom cost 80p and its cover promised “the most controversial social document since Cathy Come Home”. While the latter was Ken Loach’s indictment of homelessness in Britain in the 1960s, Boyle’s book, knocked out on an old Olivetti in six weeks, threw open the barred doors of the nation’s prisons in all their baleful brutality. Now Ebury Press has republished it with a foreword by another rebellious Scot, Irvine Welsh, and a rueful afterword by Boyle himself.

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