His fiction and short stories feature accounts of internal mental processes of usually, but not exclusively, working class narrators and their labyrinthine struggles with authority or social interactions, mostly set in his home city of Glasgow.

Frequently employing stream of consciousness experimentation, Kelman's stories typically feature "an atmosphere of gnarling paranoia, imprisoned minimalism, the boredom of survival.

Four brothers, my mother a full time parent, my father in the picture framemaking and gilding trade, trying to operate a one man business and I left school at 15 etc.

[2] Kelman has mentioned Émile Zola, Albert Camus, Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Knut Hamsun, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller and James Joyce as being among the influences on his writing.

He became involved in Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing group in Glasgow, along with Tom Leonard, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington, and his short stories began to appear in magazines.

[7] These stories introduced a distinctive style, expressing first-person internal monologues in a pared-down prose using Glaswegian speech patterns, though avoiding for the most part the quasi-phonetic rendition of Tom Leonard.

Kelman's developing style has been influential on the succeeding generation of Scottish novelists, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner and Janice Galloway.

[13] Kelman's most recent novel, God's Teeth and Other Phenomena (2022), was described in a review by Gerry Hassan as a "tour de force [that] works as both a roman a clef, a writing primer and a guide to the world of literature and publishing.

"[14] Kelman's play Hardie and Baird: The Last Days, about the Radical Rising of 1820, was produced at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, under the direction of Ian Brown, between 30 June and 22 July 1990.

[17][18] Another judge, critic James Wood, recalls that "Kelman turned up at the foolishly formal, black-tie award dinner in a regular business suit and an open-necked shirt, the rebellious semiotics of which were quickly understood, and spoke about how the writer must stand up to oppression: 'My culture and my language have the right to exist, and no one has the authority to dismiss that.

their language a cross between semaphore and Morse code; apostrophes here and apostrophes there; a strange hotchpoth of bad phonetics and horrendous spelling – unlike the nice stalwart upperclass English Hero (occasionally Scottish but with no linguistic variation) whose words on the page were always absolutely splendidly proper and pure and pristinely accurate, whether in dialogue or without.

(The merchants) were men who trafficked in degradation, causing untold misery, death and starvation to thousands"[24] The Workers' City group campaigned against what was seen as the victimisation of People's Palace curator Elspeth King and a Council attempt to sell off one third of Glasgow Green.

Their activities drew the ire of Labour Party councillors and commentators, with Kelman and his colleagues Hugh Savage and Farquhar McLay being described as "an 'embarrassment' to the city's 'cultural workforce'".

The closer to the ruling class we get the less difference there exists in language and culture, until finally we find that questions fundamental to society at its widest level are settled by members of the same closely knit circle, occasionally even the same family or 'bloodline'.