Lanark and A Life in Pictures won Scottish Book of the Year in the Saltire Society Literary Awards, in 1981 and 2011 respectively. [46]

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, [67] and which has been compared to that of Diego Rivera. [68] [69] [70] Just as Joyce fitted an ordinary day in Dublin into the armature of the Odyssey, so Gray reconfigures the life of Duncan Thaw into a polyphonic Divina Commedia of Scotland. The Joyce comparison is valid on many levels and I think provides an insight into Gray’s approach and methodology as a novelist.” a b Ferguson, Brian (30 November 2019). "Lanark author Alasdair Gray gets lifetime achievement honour for his contribution to Scottish literature". The Scotsman . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Christianity, and consequently Christian culture, is tinged with gnostic influences from its inception; but has always rejected the gnostic mode of thinking as unbiblical in its presumption of the essential evil of the world we inhabit. Christianity does, however, maintain somewhat paradoxically the idea that there is a ‘better place’ which is our true home. This it calls Paradise, a realm close to God with no pain, no disease, and no death; that is a place without evil. It is a quirky, crypto-Calvinist Divine Comedy, often harsh but never mean, always honest but not always wise. Certainly it should be widely read; it should be given every chance to reach those readers – for there will surely be some, and not all of them Scots – to whom it will be, for a short time or a lifetime, the one book they would not do without.”Stivers, Valerie (2016). "Alasdair Gray, The Art of Fiction No. 232". The Paris Review. No.219 . Retrieved 12 January 2020.

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 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. [27] [28]

The inaugural Gray Day marks 40 years since the publication of Lanark

Will Self has called him "a creative polymath with an integrated politico-philosophic vision" [63] and "perhaps the greatest living [writer] in this archipelago today". [64] Gray described himself as "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glasgow pedestrian". [65] In 2019 he won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature. [46] [53] [66] Turner, Jenny (21 February 2013). "Man is the pie". London Review of Books. 35 (4) . Retrieved 12 January 2020. What's worth saying, these decades on, is that Lanark , in common with all great books, is still, and always will be, an act of resistance. It is part of the system of whispers and sedition and direct communion, one voice to another, we call literature. Its bravery in finding voice, in encouraging the enormous power of public, national, artistic, sexual and political imagination, is not something to take for granted.

This is the premise and issue of an ancient style of thinking called Gnosticism, the essential presumption of which is that we thinking, reflective beings actually don’t belong here. We have been exiled from elsewhere and are condemned to wander aimlessly in this universe of hopelessness, pain, disease, death, and... well evil until we are rescued from it and returned to whence we came. This view is expressed in too many diverse ways to be called a philosophy; but it does have an historical continuity that reflects its intellectual and emotional power. He studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957, and taught there from 1958 to 1962. It was as a student that he first embarked on what would become his novel Lanark. A city imagined at length into being itself. I had fleetingly encountered so-called "magic realism" in translated Spanish, swallowed whole some oddball 19th-century Russians, a few American books that contained depictions of very "ordinary" lives told with grandeur and depth, but nothing of the kind about, well, home. I had barely encountered any of my country's writers at all, let alone one this engaged with the present tense, this bravely alive. Scotland, my schooling had at times implied, at times openly professed, was a small, cold, bitter place that had no political clout, not much cultural heritage, joyless people and writers who were all male and all dead. As modern Scots, we were unfit to offer Art, politics or philosophy to the world, we were fit only for losing at football games. Not so, this book said: on a number of levels, not so. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (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. [4] [35] Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title. [49] 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. [50]

Current students

Believe me, this splendid logicalness has been achieved only just in time! More men have been born this century than in all the ages of history and prehistory preceding. Our man surplus has never been so vast. If this human wealth is not governed it will collapse – in places it is already collapsing – Into poverty, anarchy, disaster. Let me say at once that I do not fear wars between any government represented here today, nor do I fear revolution. The presence of that great revolutionary hero, Chairman Fu of the People’s Republic of Xanadu, shows that revolutions are perfectly able to create strong governments. What we must unite to prevent are half-baked revolts which might give desperadoes access to those doomsday machines and bottled plagues which stable governments are creating, not to use, but to prevent themselves from being bullied by equals.” Gray was a Scottish nationalist and a republican, and wrote supporting socialism and Scottish independence. He popularised the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" (taken from a poem by Canadian poet Dennis Lee) 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. On his death The Guardian referred to him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art". Macwhirter, Iain (2014). Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won A Referendum But Lost Scotland. Glasgow: Cargo Publishing. ISBN 978-1-908885-27-2. I wanted very much to love this book, which was probably my first mistake. I had heard a lot of extremely complimentary things about how it was the most unusual, eccentric and meaningful novel various people had read for ages, and I probably came to it with rather exaggerated hopes. Anyway, it's good, but it's also flawed, as to be fair the author himself admits in a rather interesting confessional Epilogue. Their efforts to hold to a life of imagination or adventure, while bound to the necessities of raising a family in an imposing industrial city, infused Gray’s own artistic vision and political instinct. He was a lifelong socialist and Scottish nationalist, who lived in the city of his birth all his life, save for a four-year spell during the second world war, when the family moved to Yorkshire.