Alasdair Gray

Gray's father, Alexander, had been wounded in the First World War. He worked for many years in a factory making boxes, often went hillwalking, and helped found the Scottish Youth Hostels Association. Gray's mother was Amy (née Fleming), whose parents had moved to Scotland from Lincolnshire because her father had been blacklisted in England for trade union membership. She worked in a clothing warehouse. Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie in north-east Glasgow on 28 December 1934; his sister Mora was born two years later. During the Second World War, Gray was evacuated to Auchterarder in Perthshire, and Stonehouse in Lanarkshire. From 1942 until 1945 the family lived in Wetherby in Yorkshire, where his father was running a hostel for workers in ROF Thorp Arch, a munitions factory. Later, Edgar Allan Poe became a powerful influence on the young Gray. When he was eleven Gray appeared on BBC children's radio reading from an adaptation of one of Aesop's Fables, and he started writing short stories as a teenager. His mother died of cancer when he was eighteen; in the same year he enrolled at Glasgow School of Art. As an art student he began what later became his first novel, Lanark, which originally carried the name Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot. In 1957 Gray graduated from art school with a degree in Design and Mural Painting. That year he won a Bellahouston Travelling scholarship, and intended to use it to paint and see galleries in Spain. A severe asthma attack left him hospitalised in Gibraltar, and he had his money stolen. From 1958–1962 Gray worked part-time as an art teacher in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, and in 1959–1960 he studied teaching at Jordanhill College. Bethsy Gray. He was married to Morag Nimmo McAlpine Gray from 1991 until her death in 2014. He lived in Glasgow his entire adult life. ==Visual art==

arts venue in Glasgow After finishing art school, Gray painted theatrical scenery for the Glasgow Pavilion and Citizens Theatre, and worked as a freelance artist. Many of his murals have been lost; surviving examples include one in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in the West End of Glasgow, and another at Hillhead subway station. His ceiling mural (in collaboration with Robert Salmon, Nichol Wheatley and others for the auditorium of the Òran Mór theatre and music venue on Byres Road is one of the largest works of art in Scotland and was painted over several years. It shows Adam and Eve embracing against a night sky, with modern people from Glasgow in the foreground. In 2014–2015 Dallas devised the Alasdair Gray Season, a citywide celebration of Gray's visual work to coincide with his 80th birthday. The main exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From the Personal to the Universal, was held at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum with over 15,000 attending. In 2023, Glasgow Museums acquired Gray's 1964 mural Cowcaddens Streetscape in the Fifties, which the artist described as "my best big oil painting", for display at the Kelvingrove Gallery. Gray said that he found writing tiring, but that painting gave him energy. ==Writing==

'' Gray's first plays were broadcast on radio (Quiet People) and television (The Fall of Kelvin Walker) in 1968. There is an epilogue four chapters before the end, with a list of the work's alleged plagiarisms, some from non-existent works. The title page of Book Four, which was used as the cover art on the paperback, was a reference to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes. Lanark has been compared with Franz Kafka and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell for its atmosphere of bureaucratic threat, and with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for its fabulism. It revivified Scottish literature, but it did not make Gray wealthy. He called it his weakest book, and he excised the sexual fantasy material and retitled it Glaswegians when he included it in his compendium Every Short Story 1951-2012. Poor Things (1992) discusses Scottish colonial history via a Frankenstein-like drama set in 19th-century Glasgow. Godwin 'God' Baxter is a scientist who implants a suicide victim with the brain of her own unborn child. It won a Whitbread Novel Award and a Guardian Fiction Prize. It was later adapted into a film starring Emma Stone, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; the novel was adapted for the screen by Tony McNamara. A History Maker (1994) is set in a 23rd-century matriarchal society in the area around St Mary's Loch, and shows a utopia going wrong. The Book of Prefaces (2000) tells the story of the development of the English language and of humanism, using a selection of prefaces from books ranging from Cædmon to Wilfred Owen. Gray selected the works, wrote extensive marginal notes, and translated some earlier pieces into modern English. Around 2000, Gray had to apply to the Scottish Artists' Benevolent Association for financial support, as he was struggling to survive on the income from his book sales. Gray stood down from the post in 2003, having disagreed with other staff about the direction the programme should take. Gray's books are mainly set in Glasgow and other parts of Scotland. His work helped strengthen and deepen the development of the Glasgow literary scene away from gang fiction, while also resisting neoliberal gentrification. Gray described himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian". In 2019 he won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature. His books are self-illustrated using strong lines and high-impact graphics, a unique and highly recognisable style influenced by his early exposure to William Blake and Aubrey Beardsley, comics, Ladybird Books, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia, and which has been compared to that of Diego Rivera. He published three collections of poetry; like his fiction, his poems are sometimes-humorous depictions of "big themes" like love, God and language. Stuart Kelly described them as having "a dispassionate, confessional voice; technical accomplishment utilised to convey meaning rather than for its own sake and a hard-won sense of the complexity of the universe…. His poetic work, especially when dealing with the relationship, or lack thereof, between the sexes, is memorable and disconcerting in the way only good poetry is." ==Political views==

'', 4 May 2014, supporting a "Yes" vote in that year's independence referendum in 2011 Gray was a Scottish nationalist. He started voting for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s, despairing about the erosion of the welfare state which had provided his education. Gray believed that North Sea oil should be nationalised, and wrote three pamphlets advocating Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, noting at the beginning of Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992) that "by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is eligible to vote." In 2014 he wrote that "the UK electorate has no chance of voting for a party which will do anything to seriously tax our enlarged millionaire class that controls Westminster." In a 2012 essay, Gray expressed his disapproval of English immigrants to Scotland who in his view only came to Scotland to advance their careers in the arts. He frequently used the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" in his books; by 1991, the phrase had become a slogan for Scottish opposition to Thatcherism. It was referred to by SNP politicians during the 2007 Scottish Parliament election campaign, when they became a minority government for the first time. In 2001, Gray was narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill when he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association for the post of Rector of the University of Glasgow. A longstanding supporter of the SNP and the Scottish Socialist Party, Gray voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election in an effort to unseat Labour, who he regarded as "corrupted"; by the 2019 election he was voting Labour as a protest against the SNP for not being radical enough. Gray designed a special front page for the Sunday Herald in May 2014 when it came out in favour of a "Yes" vote in that year's independence referendum, the first and only newspaper to do so. The newspaper described independence as "the chance to alter course, to travel roads less taken, to define a destiny", and the editor, Richard Walker, criticised the scare tactics of the "No" side and stressed that independence was normal. Gray's design, and his and the paper's support for independence, attracted widespread coverage at the time and later. The cover consists of a large thistle surrounded by Scottish saltires. Iain Macwhirter of the Herald wrote that it was "striking", and The National said Gray's image had "galvanised the 'Yes' movement". Despite Scotland narrowly voting against independence, Gray felt the result was more favourable than a narrow Yes win. ==Later life==

In 1990, he co-founded the publishing company Dog and Bone Press with Chris Boyce and Chris's wife, Angela. In 2008, Gray's former student and secretary Rodge Glass published a biography of him, called ''Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography''. Glass sums up critics' main problems with Gray's writing as their discomfort with his politics, and with his frequent tendency to pre-empt criticism in his work. In 2014 Gray's autobiography Of Me & Others was released, and Kevin Cameron made a feature-length film Alasdair Gray: A Life in Progress, including interviews with Liz Lochhead and Gray's sister, Mora Rolley. In August 2015 a dramatisation of Lanark was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. was adapted by David Greig and directed by Graham Eatough. In June 2015 Gray was seriously injured in a fall, after which he used a wheelchair. He continued to write; the first two parts of his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy trilogy were published in 2018 and 2019. ==Death and legacy==

Alasdair Gray died at Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow on 29 December 2019, the day after his 85th birthday, following a short illness. He left his body to science and there was no funeral. Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, remembered him as "one of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times." Tributes were also paid by Jonathan Coe, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith and Irvine Welsh. The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art". Sorcha Dallas was responsible for packing and organising his items posthumously and establishing the Alasdair Gray Archive in March 2020. The Archive is a free community resource caring for Gray's studio and visual and literary materials. It commissions new works, offers access and education opportunities as well as partnering on projects and events. One such event is Gray Day, held annually on 25 February in celebration of Gray's life and works. ==Selected writing==

Novels • Lanark (1981), • 1982, Janine (1984), • The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), • Something Leather (1990), • McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990), • Poor Things (1992), • A History Maker (1994), • Mavis Belfrage (1996), • Old Men in Love (2007), Short stories • Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), • Lean Tales (1985) (with James Kelman and Agnes Owens) (1995), • Ten Tales Tall & True (1993), • The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003), • Every Short Story by Alasdair Gray 1951-2012 (2012), Theatre • A Gray Play Book (2009), • Fleck (2011), ==Notes==