William McIlvanney is probably the most important Scottish novelist to have emerged in the 1960s. He was born in 1936 in Kilmarnock, was educated at Kilmarnock Academy and went on to the University of Glasgow where he did a degree in English. After university he was a teacher for seventeen years, rising to the rank of Assistant Headmaster before giving up teaching to write full time. His first published novel, Remedy is None (1966), won the Geoffrey Faber memorial award and is about the reaction of a university student to the death of his father. Though on the surface this is a realistic study of a boy from the Scottish working class, there is clearly interplay with Shakespeare's Hamlet. McIlvanney's second novel, A Gift

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