Alasdair Gray

 ( 1934 Births ) 

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 , 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 magic realism. It revivified Scottish literature, inspired a new generation of Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and Iain Banks, and has been called "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction", but it did not make Gray wealthy. His 2010 illustrated autobiography A Life in Pictures outlined the parts of Lanark he based on his own experiences: his mother died when he was young, he went to art school, suffered from chronic eczema and shyness, and found difficulty in relationships with women. His first short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature in 1983. It is a selection of Gray's short fiction from 1951–1983.

Gray regarded 1982, Janine, published in 1984, as his best work. Partly inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the stream-of-consciousness narrative depicts Jock McLeish, a middle-aged Conservative security supervisor who is alcoholism, and describes how people and sectors of society are controlled against their best interests, over a background of the sadomasochism sexual fantasy that McLeish concocts to distract himself from his misery. Anthony Burgess, who had called Gray "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott" on the strength of Lanark, found 1982, Janine "juvenile".

(1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) were based on television scripts Gray had written in the 1960s and 1970s, and describe the adventures of Scottish protagonists in London. Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title. 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 was Gray's most commercially successful work and he enjoyed writing it. The London Review of Books considered it his funniest novel, and a welcome return to form. 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 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. In 2001 Gray, Kelman and Leonard became joint professors of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities. 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's work, particularly Lanark, "put Scotland back on the literary map", and strongly influenced Scottish fiction for decades. The frequent political themes in his writing argue the importance of promoting ordinary human decency, protecting the weak from the strong, and remembering the complexity of social issues. They are treated in a playfully humorous and postmodernism manner, and some stories, especially Lanark, 1982, Janine, and Something Leather, depict sexual frustration.

Will Self has called him "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" and "perhaps the greatest living writer in this archipelago today". 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."