Chris McQueer’s granny thinks he should get a real job. The 27-year-old Glaswegian, who quit his work punting trainers in a sportswear shop last year to concentrate on a writing career that has already prompted comparisons to Irvine Welsh, admits that he still feels shy describing himself as an author.

“Even with taxi drivers, if they ask ‘Whit dae ye dae?’, I still tell them I work in the sports shop. I feel a bit poncy...” But McQueer has had to get used to talking about himself since he started self-publishing short stories on Twitter three years ago to see if he could make his pals laugh. His first collection, Hings, brought into book form by the independent Edinburgh publisher 404 Ink in 2017, won the Saboteur awards best short story collection the following year.

Now a fixture on Glasgow’s spoken word circuit, McQueer’s second collection, HWFG (Here We Fucking Go) was similarly praised when it came out at the back end of last year and he is now working on his first novel. Actor Martin Compston describes him as “Charlie Brooker on Buckfast”.

Sharing his stories online – “I’d just assumed it would be loads of people going, ‘This is shit’, but I got really nice feedback” – was a lightbulb moment, McQueer says. “This is it, this is what I want to do. It just felt natural to me to put it online rather than submitting stuff to literary magazines. I don’t read them, none of my pals read them, just put it online, then everybody can read it.”

Building up his audience through another route has paid dividends. “Schoolkids come and see me at spoken word gigs, and then when I had my book launch there were some women in their 60s from a book group. It was so cool all these different people all laughing at the same toilet humour.”

Skinnier than his jeans, with fine-boned features dominated by huge, dark eyebrows, McQueer is quite humble about his trajectory, but there’s a lot more than lavatorial gags. His talent zings off the page in a series of contortions of the everyday, by turns grotesque, absurd and poignant but always 100% Scottish. In one Black Mirror-style tale, anonymous dares to win prize money on social media become ever bloodier. Another yarn concerns the unforeseeable consequences of a botched hand transplant, while a third offers the funniest misinterpretation of Brexit our beleaguered prime minister could wish for.

And this may be something unique to McQueer: his affectionately, sometimes surgically, observed characters have an effervescence that the likes of Welsh or Brooker don’t always allow. His stories, which start off disarmingly ordinary then twist towards something altogether more surreal or horrifying, are as likely to end with a slap of humour than teeth-grinding nihilism.

Like fellow Scots vernacularists Welsh and Limmy, McQueer writes as he talks and his stories are spiked with gallus (bold) words and phrases like glaikit (stupid), clatty (dirty) and bumping yer gums (chatting) that may require some translation for those beyond a Glasgow postcode.

But for McQueer, writing in Scots is about accessibility. “When I started writing it just felt natural to write how I talk. The only writing I’d came across that was in Glaswegian Scots, like my family spoke, was Tom Leonard’s poetry. I think that’s part of the reason that my books have been picked up by a lot of people. I get a lot of messages on Twitter saying, ‘This is the first book I’ve read since school.’ And I think that’s because of how I’ve written it, so it feels like it’s for people like us.

“I’ve always felt like Scots is our language,” he goes on, “because we’ve got so many unique words and phrases. Even when I was in primary school if the teacher asked me something and I said aye and naw, they’d correct me and say it’s yes and no. Why though? That’s how you talk when you’re no in the school, so why are we all in this big charade, why are you trying to make me talk like a newsreader? It grates on me!”

McQueer was brought up and still lives in Glasgow’s east end, an area more often highlighted for its poverty. “The east end is the perfect place for a writer to live,” he insists. “Growing up with so many characters living round about: if I’m struggling for ideas, I can just think of some mad thing that happened in my childhood.”

The sports shop was another mine of material, he explains. “All day, every day, I’m interacting with people, picking up on their wee quirks and getting stories out of them. I do miss that now. I feel I’m not exposed to as many people any more.” He muses: “Maybe I need to go back part-time.”

• HWFG by Chris McQueer is published by 404 Ink.