Alasdair Gray

Born: 28-12-1934

Died: 29-12-2019

Status: Active

Books: 0 / 103 total (1 not ignored) — 0 eBooks, 0 AudioBooks

eBook status: Skipped: 1

AudioBook status: Skipped: 1

Added by: Contributor to Lanark - A Life in Four Books

Added: 2026-10-17

Last updated: 2026-10-19 15:37

Sources

SourceIDLinkBooksOverlap
GoodReads 14870 not fetched yet 1 1 (100%)
Amazon no author ID (search by name) https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3AAlasdair%20Gray 1 1 (100%)

Most recent book on record

Lanark

Date: 1981

About

Alasdair James Gray was a Scottish writer and artist. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is seen as a landmark of Scottish fiction. He published novels, short stories, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history of English and Scots literature. His works of fiction combine realism, fantasy, and science fiction with the use of his own typography and illustrations, and won several awards.

He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as his book illustrations, he painted portraits and murals. His artwork has been widely exhibited and is in several important collections. Before Lanark, he had plays performed on radio and TV.

His writing style is postmodern and has been compared with those of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. It often contains extensive footnotes explaining the works that influenced it. His books inspired many younger Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A.L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Chris Kelso and Iain Banks. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow from 1977 to 1979, and professor of Creative Writing at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities from 2001 to 2003.

Gray was a civic nationalist and a republican, and wrote supporting socialism and Scottish independence. He popularised the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" (taken from a poem by Canadian poet Dennis Leigh) which was engraved in the Canongate Wall of the Scottish Parliament Building in Edinburgh when it opened in 2004. He lived almost all his life in Glasgow, married twice, and had one son. On his death The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art".