Born on Hogmanay 1935, Jeff Torrington grew up in Glasgow’s iconic area of old-time tenement deprivation, the Gorbals, and worked in the Linwood car manufacturing plant, the home of a symbol of the new era coming into being, the 1960s Hillman Imp. Torrington contracted tuberculosis at the age of 13 and while recuperating in a Govan sanatorium became a voracious reader (teaching himself French to read Camus and Sartre), and also became a humanist.

As the old Gorbals came down and the new multistoreys (dubbed “punishment blocks” by Torrington) were erected, he began writing a novel of his life and times, to which he devoted much of his time after being made redundant from Linwood in the early 1980s. Its incubation lasted about 30 years, a period during which he returned continually to the manuscript.

Other Scottish writers were also in the process of finding their voices, and Torrington began attending writers’ groups, where he met and befriended Jim Kelman in 1979. The critical success of Kelman’s fiction in the late 1980s, and his winning of the Booker Prize in 1994 with How Late It Was, How Late, was regarded by some commentators as a new phenomenon in the literary world: a successful novelist featuring working-class characters speaking in Glaswegian. But of course Kelman had several precursors, most notably Archie Hind (obituary, April 26), whose Dear Green Place won the Guardian Prize for a First Novel in 1966, and the writers who did emerge in the 1990s, such as Irvine Welsh and Torrington himself, often did not really fit the new template.

Of the 1990s Glasgow wave, Torrington was the one who made a lasting impact, and it was Kelman who ensured that the long-gestated novel was published. Kelman persuaded Torrington to stop tinkering with it, and also persuaded his editor at Secker & Warburg to look at the novel, Swing, Hammer, Swing. Torrington’s book won the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1992. The work has no real plot — “plots are for cemeteries”, says the narrator, Tam Clay — and is remarkable for including a sex scene that is deliberately funny (“a little Simon and Garfumbling”), a rare thing for a modern Scottish novel to feature. Torrington’s acute sense of the ridiculous is also rather uncommon, and places him more in the tradition of Scottish surrealism — along with Ivor Cutler and the Beano writers — rather than in that of the gritty, urban, realist frame that some perceived him as inhabiting:

“ ‘D’you believe in this heaven’n hell stuff, then?’

‘Aye, definitely. If it wisnae true there widnae be sausages’. ”

Torrington, whom Kelman has described as being “held in great esteem” by his many friends and peers, published only one more book, The Devil’s Carousel (1996), a collection of interlinked stories set in a car factory much like Linwood, though there is at least one unfinished and unpublished work, Go Down Laughing, which many readers hope will soon see the light of day. Torrington contracted Parkinson’s disease while in his forties and the illness had an increasingly debilitating effect on his health, preventing him from typing as much he wished.

He is survived by his wife, Margaret, and their children.

Jeff Torrington, writer, was born on December, 31, 1935. He died on May 11, 2008, aged 72