Alan Cumming to record first audiobook of Alasdair Gray's classic novel Lanark

Alan Cumming is to record an audiobook of Alasdair Gray's novel Lanark. Written over a period of almost thirty years, it combines realist and dystopian surrealist depictions of the author’s home city of Glasgow. Hollywood and Broadway star Alan has called Lanark one of his favourite ever books: “This is an epic modern Scottish classic. Gray is a renowned artist as well as author and here he paints a dystopian Glasgow that is mesmerising and terrifying in equal measures.”

He revealed the project while appearing as an on-stage guest at an event hosted by Nicola Sturgeon and the crime writer Val McDermid in Edinburgh. He told the audience, "I'm about to do, later this year, a Scottish classic that just changed my life, and I can't believe they've asked me to do it, and I'm not allowed to say what it is."

After some encouragement by the hosts, The Scotsman reports, he confirmed that the novel was Lanark, a book he first encountered as a student. "Just the idea of what you could be as an artist, as a Scottish artist,” he said. “The craziness, surreality of it. I was very young when it came out. I was a student in Glasgow. It just blew my mind.

"I'd been so used to being told what our particular box was we had to stay in, and then here comes Alasdair Gray and just blew that box open."

Earlier this year Alan Cumming and Forbes Masson reunited on stage in Glasgow to celebrate the 40th anniversary of their Kelvinside comedy-cabaret duo Victor and Barry.

They created the characters in 1982 as part of a cabaret event for the final year students at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow.

Victor and Barry became huge stars thanks to annual Fringe runs and TV appearances but were “killed off” at a benefit night at the London Palladium in 1992. However the actors reunited to write and appear in The High Life, which was snapped up by the BBC in 1995.

Alasdair Gray is remembered as one of Glasgow's most important novelists and artists who made a considerable mark on the city.

He began life in the north-east of Glasgow in December 1934 as the son of Alexander and Amy Gray with his sister Mora following two years later.

After the Second World War, Gray's father moved down to Wetherby in Yorkshire to manage a hostel for workers at a munitions factory before his family shortly followed. They moved back to Glasgow after the war and Gray began to attend Jean Irwin’s art class at Kelvingrove Art Gallery which formed some of his early artistic foundations.

Gray would go on to have a celebrated and impactful career as an educator, painter and author with pieces of his public art being part of the fabric of Glasgow and cultural touchstones of the West End.

His 1992 novel Poor Things was recently adapted into a film, which has received 11 Oscar nominations after winning seven Golden Globes.