Lanark: A Life in Four Books (Canongate Classics)

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Goldie, David (2015). "Scottish Fiction". In James, David (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction, 1945-2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-04023-6. Littler, Jo (25 September 2009). "Alasdair Gray by Rodge Glass". The Guardian . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Alasdair designed our entrance porch, and since Òran Mór is Gaelic for ‘The Great Music’ – meaning both the music of nature and of the pibroch – he painted the walls with rampant Scottish bagpipe-playing lions. The lions are made less threatening by the bagpipes they play in what Alasdair described his ‘jocular’ mural.

Self, Will (12 January 2006). "Alasdair Gray: An Introduction". will-self.com. Archived from the original on 21 May 2014 . Retrieved 21 May 2014. Even at the height of his literary and artistic success (in the autumn of 2010 there were two Gray exhibitions showing in Edinburgh at the same time), Gray feared poverty. “I am a well-known writer who cannot make a living from his writing,” he would say. Despite the status of Lanark, its sales never equalled its reputation. 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. Coe, Jonathan (8 October 1992). "Gray's Elegy". London Review of Books. 14 (19) . Retrieved 7 January 2020.

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In August 2015 a dramatisation of Lanark was performed at the Edinburgh International Festival. was adapted by David Greig and directed by Graham Eatough. [23] (It had previously been dramatised at the festival by the TAG Theatre Company in 1995. [94] [95])

To a reader in a country where resignation is a national pastime, a country where the standard childhood training lists "showing off" as the worst sin of all, a country whose church, family and education systems used once to ring with the hurled accusation, "Who do you think you are - someone special?", this encouragement to strive nonetheless was powerful stuff. And how much, how very much, it touched the heart. In 2001, Gray was narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill when he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association for the post of Rector of the University of Glasgow. [79] A longstanding supporter of the SNP and the Scottish Socialist Party, Gray voted Liberal Democrat at the 2010 general election in an effort to unseat Labour, who he regarded as "corrupted"; [80] by the 2019 election he was voting Labour as a protest against the SNP for not being radical enough. [81]

Spowart, Nan (30 December 2019). "Alasdair Gray: A lifelong supporter of Scottish independence". The National . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Lanark, alışılmış olmayan (dönemine göre ve bence hala şu an da geçerli) farklı edebi perspektiflerin bir araya getirildiği ve kahraman- yaratıcı temasını bilimkurgu, büyüsel gerçekcilik ile harmanlandığı, ya da diğer bir deyişle Gray'in bilimkurgu ve fantazi edebiyatı bir aracı olarak kullandığı müthiş bir postmodern eser. The impulse to write as well as draw emerged in childhood. While at art school, he began a novel called Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot, which contained the seed that grew into Lanark, almost 30 years later. In the 1960s and 70s, he wrote plays for radio, television and the stage, including some which would later be converted into novels. The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985), his third novel, began life as a TV play in 1968. McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) and Mavis Belfrage (1996) had similar origins. Some 20 of these plays were later collected in A Gray Play Book (2009). It included The Cave of Polyphemus, written in 1944, when he was nine. Gray came to fiction late, publishing his first novel Lanark at the age of 46 in 1981. A experimental, pornographic fantasy – 1982, Janine – followed three years later, with his rambunctious reworking of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Poor Things, appearing in 1992. As his literary reputation increased, winning both the Guardian fiction prize and the Whitbread novel award in 1992, the elaborate illustrations he created for his books began to draw attention to the pictorial art Gray had been producing all along. The stream of commissions for murals and portraits gradually increased, and he finished his career as one of Scotland’s most admired and versatile artists. Peering up at the slate-grey slab overhead from the balcony of the Elite Café, squinting at his never-to-be-finished mural on the doomed kirk wall, struggling to walk an impossibly-tilting, poorly-signposted road, he is driven mad. to tears, to hysteria and despair, but he persists.