One of Scotland's unique literary voices, the writer Jeff Torrington, has died aged 72.

The author of the award winning novel, Swing Hammer Swing!, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1992, had long suffered from Parkinson's Disease, and died early on Sunday morning.

Torrington's success, with a novel that took 30 years to write, was considered a triumph for Scottish writing and put his name alongside Scottish writers such as James Kelman and Alasdair Gray.

Born in December 1935, Torrington began his novel not long after the time in which it was set - Gorbals in the 1960s, near the end of a demolition programme which moved thousands of people into new estates at the edge of the city. The story of Tam Clay has been described as "dark and moving" as well as fresh and original, and it was also acclaimed for its humour and verbal exuberance.

It was made into a play by the Citizens' Theatre, and was at one time serialised in the Evening Times.

Torrington devoted himself to writing after being made redundant from the Linwood car factory. His earlier stories appeared in the Evening Times, the New Edinburgh Review and the former Edinburgh Evening Dispatch.

Robin Robertson, the award- winning poet, and Torrington's editor at his publishers, Secker, said he was "a great man, and will be hugely missed".

He added: "It was an honour and a pleasure to be involved in publishing Jeff Torrington's work. His fiction - energetic, vividly imagined, pungently accurate and wildly funny - has a lot of the man in it, and a lot of Glasgow.

"To take such a well-deserved place alongside that city's finest novelists - Alasdair Gray, James Kelman and Janice Galloway - and doing so with his first and only novel, was great to watch."

Jeff Torrington leaves his wife, Margaret, and three children, Jeff, Andrew and Ruth.

Last night his son, Andrew, said the funeral would be on Friday in Paisley.

He added: "The publication and subsequent success of Swing Hammer Swing! may have been a big day for Scottish literature and it was certainly an important time for his family.

"We felt he had received the recognition he rightly deserved. He was a giant in all our eyes. The gap he leaves behind will be felt most keenly but not exclusively by his family."