Gray, Alasdair

Alasdair Gray, (born December 28, 1934, East Glasgow, Scotland—died December 29, 2019, Glasgow), Scottish novelist, playwright, and artist best known for his surreal atmospheric novel Lanark (1981).

Gray’s family was evacuated from Glasgow during World War II. He later returned to attend Whitehill Senior Secondary School, where he wrote and drew for the school magazine, and the Glasgow School of Art. He went on to work as a muralist and a scene painter for local theatres. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he also wrote plays for television, radio, and the stage, all the while working on a novel that would be decades in the making. When he finally published Lanark, his first book, it was hailed as a landmark of Scottish literature.

Subsequent fiction included 1982, Janine (1984), The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), Poor Things (1992), A History Maker (1994), and Old Men in Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers (2007). His short fiction was collected as Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Ten Tales Tall & True (1993), and The Ends of Our Tethers: 13 Sorry Stories (2003). Every Short Story, 1951–2012 was published in 2012.

In 2000 Gray edited The Book of Prefaces, which he also designed and illustrated, and he began restoring murals he had painted in the 1970s. In 2001 he became a professor of creative writing at the University of Glasgow. Throughout his career, Gray’s murals, writings, and political activism endorsed socialism, opposed war and nuclear arms, and advocated Scottish independence. He notably argued for the latter in Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992; rev. ed. 1997) and Independence: An Argument for Home Rule (2014). Of Me and Others (2014) was a compilation of autobiographical writings.