Jeff Torrington

{{Short description|Scottish writer (1935–2008)}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=February 2021}}

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.{{cite news|url=https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12623330.swing-hammer-swing-blow-by-blow/|title=Swing Hammer Swing, blow by blow|date=1 February 1993|work=The Herald|location=Glasgow|accessdate=13 October 2018}} 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.{{cite news|url=https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/12047387.custom-built-model/|title=Custom-built model|last=Linklater|first=John|date=12 April 1996|work=The Herald|location=Glasgow|accessdate=13 October 2018}}

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{{cite book|last=Kravitz|first=Peter|title=The Picador Book of Contemporary Scottish Fiction|year=1997|publisher=Picador|isbn=0330335502|page=xvii|url=https://archive.org/details/picadorbookofcon0000unse}} and a creative writing group in Glasgow associated with Philip Hobsbaum, which also included Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Alasdair Gray and Aonghas MacNeacail.