Describing himself as a ‘maker of imagined objects,’ Alasdair Gray has been a prolific producer of novels, short stories, plays, poems, pamphlets and literary criticism. He is also an accomplished artist who has painted remarkable murals and is the designer and illustrator of his own books and those of other writers.

Alasdair James Gray was born on 28 December 1934. At the age of five he was evacuated to Lanarkshire along with his mother and younger sister before being reunited with his father in Wetherby, Yorkshire, in 1941. After the war the family returned to Glasgow where Gray attended Whitehill Senior Secondary School. As a teenager Gray wrote a version of one of Aesop’s fables which he read, along with some poems, on a BBC children’s programme. At the same time he was writing and drawing pieces which appeared in the Whitehill School Magazine. After leaving school Gray studied at Glasgow School of Art where he specialised in murals. His experiences as a child and young adult in Glasgow would later form the basis for books One and Two of Lanark, his first and still his best known novel.

After graduating Alasdair Gray taught art in Lanarkshire and painted murals in churches and a synagogue. Many of these murals were lost when the buildings were destroyed, but some, together with Gray’s later work, still survive. Between 1960 and 1962 Gray worked as a scene painter in the Glasgow Pavilion and Glasgow Citizens theatres and from 1977 until 1978 he was employed as artist-recorder at Glasgow’s People’s Palace. In the 1960s and 1970s Gray wrote plays for radio, television and stage, many of which would be revised and reappear later in prose form. During this time Gray continued to work on the novel which would eventually be published as Lanark in 1981. Gray attended Philip Hobsbaum’s Glasgow writers’ group, along with fellow Glaswegians James Kelman and Tom Leonard.

Since 1981 Gray has worked mostly as novelist and short story writer. He has also worked as a writer in residence and later Professor of Creative Writing, along with James Kelman and Tom Leonard, at the University of Glasgow. A well known socialist and supporter of Scottish independence, Gray’s activism extends beyond the covers of his books, protesting against nuclear weapons at Faslane and against the second Gulf War in 2003.