Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray is one of the great figures of contemporary Scottish writing. Born in Riddrie, Glasgow in 1934, he went to Whitehill Senior Secondary school in the city before studying Design & Mural Painting at the Glasgow School of Art in the 1950s. Between 1958 and 1962 he taught Art at schools in Glasgow and Lanarkshire, and painted murals on a number of churches and other buildings in the city.

Gray then became a stage painter for a Glasgow theatre, and in 1963 he submitted the first book of his novel Lanark to a literary agent. It was rejected. Gray continued to paint and write playscripts for stage, TV and radio. Between 1977 and 1979, Gray was a Writer in Residence at the University of Glasgow.

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark was finally published in 1981 by Edinburgh’s Canongate Books, then a very small company who accepted Gray’s offer to design the cover of the book to save money. The novel, a semi-autobiographical mix of science fiction, fantasy and politics, won the David Niven and Saltire Society Awards. Canongate also won a Scottish Arts Council award for the book’s design. After the success of Lanark, Gray became a full-time writer, artist and illustrator. As well as illustrating his own works, and painting murals, he has also designed covers for Chapman literary magazine. A well known socialist, Gray has campaigned for Scottish independence and against nuclear weapons.

In 1992 he married his second wife, Morag McAlpine, and the following year won the Whitbread Novel Award for Poor Things. In 2001 Gray became joint professor of Creative Writing at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde, alongside fellow writers Tom Leonard and James Kelman.

The writer Rodge Glass, who had been working as Gray’s secretary, wrote a biography of Gray in 2008. In 2011, Gray initially rejected a Saltire Society Award for his auto-biographical A Life in Pictures, though he later accepted the prize.

In November 2019, he received a Lifetime Achievement award by the Saltire Society. He died in December 2019, aged eighty-five.