Lanark and A Life in Pictures won Scottish Book of the Year in the Saltire Society Literary Awards, in 1981 and 2011 respectively. [46] I wish I could make you like death a little more. It’s a great preserver. Without it the loveliest things change slowly into farce, as you will discover if you insist on having much more life.”

The Unthank parts of the book may be considered as part of the "social-commentary" tradition of science fiction, and Lanark has often been compared with Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. [6] Gray, Alasdair (19 June 2014). "London rule can't deliver a better Scotland". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 January 2020.

1934 – 2019

Even at the height of his literary and artistic success (in the autumn of 2010 there were two Gray exhibitions showing in Edinburgh at the same time), Gray feared poverty. “I am a well-known writer who cannot make a living from his writing,” he would say. Despite the status of Lanark, its sales never equalled its reputation. a b c Sansom, Ian (19 September 2008). "Review: Alasdair Gray by Rodge Glass". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 January 2020. If it's woman trouble," said the man, "I can advise you because I was married once. I had a wife who did terrible things, things I cannae mention in the presence of a wean. You see, woman are different from us. They're seventy-five per cent water. You can read that in Pavlov."

Goodwin, Karin (1 December 2019). "Alasdair Gray wins book award for influence "running deep within Scotland" ". The National . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Immediately after leaving art school, in 1958, Gray received a commission (unpaid, apart from expenses) to paint a set of murals on the subject of the Creation, in Greenhead Church of Scotland church in Glasgow. “I showed God as the third sentence of Genesis says,” Gray wrote in A Life in Pictures, “moving over the waters, not like a dove as sometimes depicted, but more like Superman.” The building was neglected over the following decade, and was demolished in 1970, leading to the loss of what Gray called “my best and biggest mural painting”. He did several other murals: in Belleisle Street synagogue, in Greenbank church, on the walls of private houses, among other places. Among the last he carried out (2012) was the 40ft mural for the entrance hall of Hillhead subway station in the West End of Glasgow. In addition to local landmarks, including the university, it has a section devoted to “All kinds of folk” – “hard workers”, “head cases”, “queer fishes” and so on, all represented in Gray’s typical witty and accessible style.His writing style is postmodern and has been compared with those of Franz Kafka, G 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.

I could’ve actually done without the four chapters that succeeded the Epilogue. I found them mostly pointless, and the Epilogue itself has a sort of choose your own ending option baked in that I think would’ve worked remarkably well as an ending itself. works available on Gray and his work.Especially useful is Crawford and Nairn's work The arts of Alasdair Gray When you come down to it…I just didn’t like it. Admittedly, one could write an elaborate PhD thesis about the themes, symbolism, structure and style of this book. If I were willing to take it seriously, I probably could wing a few deep thoughts about it. But I can’t bring myself to because I just disliked it. Peering up at the slate-grey slab overhead from the balcony of the Elite Café, squinting at his never-to-be-finished mural on the doomed kirk wall, struggling to walk an impossibly-tilting, poorly-signposted road, he is driven mad. to tears, to hysteria and despair, but he persists.

Staff

Old Negatives (1989) ISBN 978-0-224-02656-7, Sixteen Occasional Poems (2000) ISBN 978-0-9538359-0-4, and Collected Verse (2010) ISBN 978-1-906120-53-5 Settlers and Colonists by Alasdair Gray". Word-power.co.uk. 20 December 2012. Archived from the original on 21 May 2014 . Retrieved 21 May 2014. When dawn comes up and retires in dismay, we find ourselves in the presence of an overpowering surreal imagination. A saga of a city where reality is about as reliable as a Salvador Dali watch Dallas first worked with Gray in 2008 when she was running her commercial gallery, but she had long been aware of his work as both writer and artist and of how it “permeated through the West End of Glasgow, an area I’ve lived most of my adult life”. She would see occasional snatched glimpses through tenement windows of paintings by him, and there were more public works to view, such as his celebrated murals in The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant.