Whitbread Award winner

The pounds 22,500 Whitbread Book of the Year award went last night to Jeff Torrington, 57, for a first novel which took 30 years to write. The Glaswegian writer, an unemployed former labourer who suffers from Parkinson's disease, won the prize for Swing Hammer Swing], set in the Gorbals in the late 1960s.