Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish writer and artist. 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.
Utilising a postmodern writing style, Gray's works have been compared with those of Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino; and often contain extensive footnotes explaining the works that influenced them. His books inspired many younger Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway, Chris Kelso and Iain Banks. His first novel, Lanark (1981), is considered a landmark of Scottish fiction; in a 2016 public poll by the BBC, it was named the third-best Scottish novel of all time. He was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow from 1977 to 1979 and a professor of Creative Writing from 2001 to 2003; simultaneously holding the latter position at the University of Strathclyde.
Gray studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as his book illustrations, he painted portraits and murals, including at the Òran Mór venue and one at Hillhead subway station. His artwork has been widely exhibited and is held in several important collections. Before Lanark, he had written plays for radio and television.
Gray was a Scottish nationalist and a republican, and wrote in support of socialism and Scottish independence. He popularised the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" 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. After his death in 2019, The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art".
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.
Gray frequently visited the public library; he enjoyed the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and comics such as The Beano and The Dandy. Later, Edgar Allan Poe became a powerful influence on the young Gray. His family lived on a council estate in Riddrie, and he attended Whitehill Secondary School, where he was made editor of the school magazine and won prizes for Art and English. 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. He completed the first book in 1963; it was rejected by the Curtis Brown literary agency. It was originally intended to be Gray's version of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
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.
Gray married Inge Sørensen, a teen-aged nurse from Denmark, in 1961. They had a son, Andrew, in 1963, and separated in 1969. He had an eight-year relationship with Danish jeweller 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.
After finishing art school, Gray painted theatrical scenery for the Glasgow Pavilion and Citizens Theatre, and worked as a freelance artist. His first mural was "Horrors of War" for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society in Glasgow. In 1964 the BBC made a documentary film, Under the Helmet, about his career to date. 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 1977–1978, Gray worked for the People's Palace museum, as Glasgow's "artist recorder", funded by a scheme set up by the Labour government. He produced hundreds of drawings of the city, including portraits of politicians, people in the arts, members of the general public and workplaces with workers. These are now in the collection at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
In 2003, Gray began working with gallerist Sorcha Dallas who, over the next 14 years, helped to develop interest in his visual practice, brokering sales to major collections including the Arts Council of England, the Scottish National Galleries and the Tate. His paintings and prints are also held in Glasgow Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Library of Scotland and the Hunterian Museum.
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 more than 15,000 attending.
His first solo London exhibition took place in late 2017 at the Coningsby Gallery in Fitzrovia and the Leyden Gallery in Spitalfields.
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. His visual art often used local or personal details to encompass international or universal truths and themes.
Gray's first plays were broadcast on radio (Quiet People) and television (The Fall of Kelvin Walker) in 1968. Between 1972 and 1974 he took part in a writing group organised by Philip Hobsbaum, which included James Kelman, Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Aonghas MacNeacail and Jeff Torrington. In 1973, with the support of Edwin Morgan, he received a grant from the Scottish Arts Council to allow him to continue with Lanark. From 1977 to 1979 he was writer-in-residence at the University of Glasgow.
Lanark, his first novel, was published in 1981 to great acclaim, and became his best-known work. The book tells two parallel stories. One, the first written, is a Bildungsroman, a realist depiction of Duncan Thaw, a young artist growing up in Glasgow in the 1950s. The other is a dystopia, where the character Lanark visits Unthank, which is ruled by the Institute and the Council, opaque bodies which exercise absolute power. Lanark enters politics believing he can change Unthank for the better, but gets drunk and disgraces himself. Later, when he is dying, his son Sandy tells him "The world is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse to be bullied." 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.