Great Glaswegians: Alasdair Gray - the Riddrie-boy who revolutionised Scottish literature

Alasdair Gray was born on 28 December, 1934 in Riddrie in the north-east of the city. Skilled in Art and English at Whitehill Secondary School before enrolling in Glasgow School of Art. It was here that he would begin work on what would become his defining legacy - Lanark.

The manuscript, then named Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot, would form books one and two of Lanark. In Gray’s typical playful fashion, these books would form the middle of the book - bookended by books three and four.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot was rejected by literary agent Curtis Brown.

Gray’s focus was still art. In the years after his graduation from Glasgow School of Art he painted scenery for Glasgow Pavilion and Citizens Theatre. He was commissioned for murals around the city, few of which still survive. The Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in the West End of Glasgow is one of the most recognisable still remaining in the city. Another remains at Hillhead subway station.

In 1981, Lanark would finally be published. The Bildungsroman style novel tells the story, first of Lanark and his ascent through Unthank and then of Duncan Thaw and his life as a young boy and then young man in 1950s Glasgow. The book was met with critical acclaim and became his best known work.

There are obvious parallels between Gray and Thaw. The mural he painstakingly paints through much of the second book crept frequently into his own work. The scene depicting the Garden of Eden was painted at Greenhead Church in 1963, the church has since been brought down. It was further explored in the Oran Mor auditorium, where it is now the largest piece of public art in Scotland.

Further, the character of Thaw suffers from a debilitating asthma-like condition. Gray himself suffered a severe asthma attack which left him hospitalised in Gibraltar during his early years.

The rest of the book however is a surrealist work depicting Glasgow as Hell. Gray said he wished for the book to be “read in one order but eventually thought of in another.” Anthony Burgess, author of Clockwork Orange, named the book in his Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice list - saying “It was about time that Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.” The irony is of course that Gray himself was an unabashed plagiarist - detailing each, and inventing some, in an Index of Plagiarisms.

Gray continued to paint and write for the next four decades, publishing nine novels and numerous short stories. His mural at Oran Mor is one of the most celebrated of his later works. His novel Poor Things, published in 1992, was met with some of the same critical success, winning the Whitbread Prize and the Guardian Fiction Prize. In 2023, the first major adaptation of his work was produced with the release of Poor Things.

Gray passed away in 2019 aged 85, by then he was one of the country’s most celebrated artists and recognised as one of Scotland’s most important people. However, it is perhaps in Glasgow that he has been embraced the most, a city that he embraced just as equally.

In Lanark he wrote: “Glasgow is a magnificent city… Why do we hardly ever notice that?”