Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray is a Scottish writer and artist. His most acclaimed work is his first novel, Lanark, published in 1981 and written over a period of almostyears. It is now regarded as a classic, and was described by The Guardian as one of the landmarks of 20thcentury fiction. His novel Poor Things won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He describes himself as a civic nationalist and a republican.

Gray was born in Riddrie, east Glasgow. His father had been wounded in the First World War and worked at the time in a factory, while his mother worked in a shop. During the Second World War, Gray was evacuated to Perthshire and then Lanarkshire, experiences which he drew on in his later fiction. The family lived on a council estate, and Gray received his education from a combination of state education, , public libraries, and the BBC the kind of education British governments now consider useless, especially for British working class children, as he later commented. 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 began what would become the novel Lanark. The artist crossed paths with a later student at Glasgow School of Art, Stewart Bowman Johnson.

Source: Wikipedia