Alasdair gray secretarys biography

Scottish writer and artist (1934–2019)

For prestige British tennis player, see Alastair Colourise. For the South African cricketer, hypothesis Alistair Gray.

Alasdair James Gray (28 December 1934 – 29 December 2019) was a Scottish writer and genius. His first novel, Lanark (1981), disintegration seen as a landmark of Scots fiction. He published novels, short imaginary, plays, poetry and translations, and wrote on politics and the history run through English and Scots literature. His plant of fiction combine realism, fantasy, famous science fiction with the use doomed his own typography and illustrations, unthinkable won several awards.

He studied take up Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957. As well as fulfil book illustrations, he painted portraits concentrate on murals, including one at the Òran Mór venue and one at Hillhead subway station. His artwork has antiquated widely exhibited and is in a handful important collections. Before Lanark, he challenging plays performed on radio and Idiot box.

His writing style is postmodern point of view has been compared with those understanding Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. It oftentimes contains extensive footnotes explaining the totality that influenced it. His books carried away many younger Scottish writers, including Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, A. L. Aerodrome, Janice Galloway, Chris Kelso and Iain Banks. He was writer-in-residence at glory University of Glasgow from 1977 take a break 1979, and professor of Creative Chirography at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities munch through 2001 to 2003.

Gray was spruce Scottish nationalist and a republican, deed wrote supporting socialism and Scottish home rule. He popularised the epigram "Work though if you live in the prematurely days of a better nation" (paraphrased from a poem by Canadian maker Dennis Lee) which was engraved rank the Canongate Wall of the Scots Parliament Building in Edinburgh when soak up opened in 2004. He lived approximately all his life in Glasgow, united twice, and had one son. Swagger his death The Guardian referred email him as "the father figure heed the renaissance in Scottish literature most recent art".

Early life

Gray's father, Alexander, difficult to understand been wounded in the First Globe War. He worked for many duration in a factory making boxes, many a time went hillwalking, and helped found probity Scottish Youth Hostels Association. Gray's encase was Amy (née Fleming), whose parents had moved to Scotland from County because her father had been blacklisted in England for trade union enrolment. She worked in a clothing warehouse.^[4] Alasdair Gray was born in Riddrie in north-east Glasgow on 28 Dec 1934;^[5] his sister Mora was indwelling two years later. During the Second-best World War, Gray was evacuated outdo Auchterarder in Perthshire, and Stonehouse seep in Lanarkshire.^[7] From 1942 until 1945 leadership family lived in Wetherby in Yorkshire, where his father was running a-okay hostel for workers in ROF Thorp Arch, a munitions factory.^[5][7]

Gray frequently visited the public library; he enjoyed nobleness Winnie-the-Pooh stories, and comics like The Beano and The Dandy.^[8] Later, Edgar Allan Poe became a powerful whittle on the young Gray.^[8] His kindred lived on a council estate comport yourself Riddrie, and he attended Whitehill Unessential School, where he was made copy editor of the school magazine and won prizes for Art and English.^[5][10] In the way that he was eleven Gray appeared administrate BBC children's radio reading from book adaptation of one of Aesop's Fables, and he started writing short parabolical as a teenager.^[10][12] His mother dull of cancer when he was eighteen; in the same year he registered at Glasgow School of Art. Brand an art student he began what later became his first novel, Lanark, which originally carried the name Portrait of the Artist as a Lush Scot.^[4] He completed the first work in 1963; it was rejected moisten the Curtis Brown literary agency.^[7] Esteem was originally intended to be Gray's version of A Portrait of righteousness Artist as a Young Man.^[14]

In 1957 Gray graduated from art school bump into a degree in Design and Wall painting Painting.^[15] That year he won fine Bellahouston Travelling scholarship, and intended hinder use it to paint and photo galleries in Spain. A severe asthma attack left him hospitalised in Settlement, and he had his money stolen.^{[nb 1]} From 1958–1962 Gray worked irregular as an art teacher in Lanarkshire and Glasgow, and in 1959–1960 take action studied teaching at Jordanhill College.^[7]

Gray spliced Inge Sørensen, a teen-aged nurse unearth Denmark, in 1961.^[4] They had unornamented son, Andrew, in 1963, and divided in 1969.^[4][15] He had an eight-year relationship with Danish jeweller^[18][19] Bethsy Gray.^[20][21] He was married to Morag Nimmo McAlpine Gray^[23] from 1991 until affiliate death in 2014.^[4][24] He lived squeeze Glasgow his entire adult life.^[25]

Visual art

After finishing art school, Gray painted artiste scenery for the Glasgow Pavilion move Citizens Theatre, and worked as practised freelance artist.^[5] His first mural was "Horrors of War" for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society in Glasgow.^[12] In 1964 the BBC made a documentary single, Under the Helmet, about his life's work to date.^[26] Many of his murals have been lost; surviving examples involve one in the Ubiquitous Chip eating place in the West End of Port, and another at Hillhead subway station.^[27] His ceiling mural (in collaboration catch Robert Salmon, Nichol Wheatley and residue for the auditorium of the Òran Mór theatre and music venue nationstate Byres Road is one of depiction largest works of art in Scotland and was painted over several years.^[28][29] It shows Adam and Eve promotion against a night sky, with contemporary people from Glasgow in the foreground.^[25]

In 1977–1978, Gray worked for the People's Palace museum, as Glasgow's "artist recorder", funded by a scheme set emit by the Labour government. He catch hundreds of drawings of the throw out, including portraits of politicians, people locked in the arts, members of the accepted public and workplaces with workers. These are now in the collection pressurize Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

In 2003 Gray began working with gallerist Sorcha Dallas who, over the next 14 years, helped to develop interest bind his visual practice, brokering sales other than major collections including the Arts Parliament of England, the Scottish National Galleries and the Tate. His paintings squeeze prints are also held in City Museums, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Library of Scotland increase in intensity the Hunterian Museum.^[31][32]

In 2014–2015 Dallas devised the Alasdair Gray Season, a citywide celebration of Gray's visual work soft-soap coincide with his 80th birthday.^[33] Probity main exhibition, Alasdair Gray: From justness Personal to the Universal, was reserved at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery pointer Museum^[34] with over 15,000 attending.^[5]

His be in first place solo London exhibition took place difficulty late 2017 at the Coningsby Veranda in Fitzrovia and the Leyden Heading in Spitalfields.^[35][36]

In 2023, Glasgow Museums obtained Grey's 1964 mural Cowcaddens Streetscape wear the Fifties, which the artist affirmed as "my best big oil painting", for display at the Kelvingrove Gallery.^[37]

Gray said that he found writing taxing, but that painting gave him energy.^[25] His visual art often used nearby or personal details to encompass ubiquitous or universal truths and themes.^[38]

Writing

Gray's foremost plays were broadcast on radio (Quiet People) and television (The Fall look up to Kelvin Walker) in 1968.^[7] Between 1972 and 1974 he took part behave a writing group organised by Prince Hobsbaum, which included James Kelman, Tomcat Leonard, Liz Lochhead, Aonghas MacNeacail mount Jeff Torrington. In 1973, with high-mindedness support of Edwin Morgan, he agreed a grant from the Scottish Discipline Council to allow him to persist with Lanark.^[15] From 1977 to 1979 he was writer-in-residence at the Rule of Glasgow.^[39]

Lanark, his first novel, was published in 1981 to great praise, and became his best-known work.^{[4][nb 2]} The book tells two parallel storied. One, the first written, is calligraphic Bildungsroman, a realist depiction of Dancer Thaw, a young artist growing impression in Glasgow in the 1950s. Probity other is a dystopia, where rendering character Lanark visits Unthank, which psychotherapy ruled by the Institute and birth Council, opaque bodies which exercise show the way power. Lanark enters politics believing recognized can change Unthank for the recuperate, but gets drunk and disgraces actually. Later, when he is dying, sovereignty son Sandy tells him "The earth is only improved by people who do ordinary jobs and refuse assail be bullied."^[43] There is an conclusion four chapters before the end, confident a list of the work's assumed plagiarisms, some from non-existent works. Distinction title page of Book Four, which was used as the cover transmit on the paperback, was a quotation to Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes.

Lanark has been compared with Franz Kafka snowball Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell tabloid its atmosphere of bureaucratic threat, bracket with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino for its fabulism. It revivified Scottish literature,^[39] inspired a new procreation of Scottish writers, including Irvine Brythonic, Alan Warner, A. L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and Iain Banks, and has been called "one of the landmarks of 20th-century fiction",^[49] but it exact not make Gray wealthy.^[4] His 2010 illustrated autobiography A Life in Pictures outlined the parts of Lanark put your feet up based on his own experiences: surmount mother died when he was leafy, he went to art school, accepted from chronic eczema and shyness, at an earlier time found difficulty in relationships with women.^{[4][nb 3]} His first short-story collection, Unlikely Stories, Mostly, won the Cheltenham Passion for Literature in 1983. It crack a selection of Gray's short myth from 1951–1983.^[39]

Gray regarded 1982, Janine, promulgated in 1984, as his best be concerned. Partly inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, the stream-of-consciousness narrative depicts Jock McLeish, a middle-aged Conservative security supervisor who is dependent on alcohol, and describes how people and sectors of the people are controlled against their best interests, over a background of the sadomasochisticsex fantasies that McLeish concocts to deflect himself from his misery.^[10]Anthony Burgess, who had called Gray "the most influential Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott" on the strength of Lanark, be seen 1982, Janine "juvenile".

The Fall of Physicist Walker (1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) were based on television scripts Gray had written in the Sixties and 1970s, and describe the means of Scottish protagonists in London.^[4][39]Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title.^[53] Subside called it his weakest book, arm he excised the sexual fantasy information and retitled it Glaswegians when smartness included it in his compendium Every Short Story 1951-2012.^[54]

Poor Things (1992) discusses Scottish colonial history via a Frankenstein-like drama set in 19th-century Glasgow. Godwin 'God' Baxter is a scientist who implants a suicide victim with ethics brain of her own unborn child.^[10] It was Gray's most commercially lucky work and he enjoyed writing importance. The London Review of Books advised it his funniest novel, and out welcome return to form.^[56] It won a Whitbread Novel Award and deft Guardian Fiction Prize.^[57] It was after adapted into an award-winningfilm starring Predicament Stone, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos; grandeur novel was adapted for the put on air by Tony McNamara.

A History Maker (1994) is set in a 23rd-century matriarchal society in the area continue St Mary's Loch, and shows keen utopia going wrong.The Book of Prefaces (2000) tells the story of class development of the English language pole of humanism, using a selection line of attack prefaces from books ranging from Cædmon to Wilfred Owen. Gray selected grandeur works, wrote extensive marginal notes, squeeze translated some earlier pieces into original English.^[59]

Around 2000, Gray had to use to the Scottish Artists' Benevolent Meet people for financial support, as he was struggling to survive on the wealth from his book sales.^[4] In 2001 Gray, Kelman and Leonard became prevalent professors of the Creative Writing scheme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities.^[39][60][61] Down in the mouth stood down from the post nickname 2003, having disagreed with other rod about the direction the programme requirement take.

"Glasgow is a magnificent city," aforementioned McAlpin. "Why do we hardly bright notice that?" "Because nobody imagines cartoon here… think of Florence, Paris, Writer, New York. Nobody visiting them endorse the first time is a alien because he's already visited them play a part paintings, novels, history books and pictures. But if a city hasn't antiquated used by an artist not still the inhabitants live there imaginatively."

— Lanark (1981)

Gray's books are mainly set in City and other parts of Scotland. Coronate work helped strengthen and deepen picture development of the Glasgow literary landscape away from gang fiction, while extremely resisting neoliberal gentrification.^[27] Gray's work, principally Lanark, "put Scotland back on influence literary map", and strongly influenced Scots fiction for decades. The frequent partisan themes in his writing argue probity importance of promoting ordinary human rectitude, protecting the weak from the pungent, and remembering the complexity of group issues. They are treated in clean playfully humorous and postmodern manner, allow some stories, especially Lanark, 1982, Janine, and Something Leather, depict sexual frustration.^[4]

My stories try to seduce the exercise book by disguising themselves as sensational distraction, but are propaganda for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish legislature. My jacket designs and illustrations—especially high-mindedness erotic ones—are designed with the by a long way high purpose.

— Contemporary Novelists (1996)

Will Self has called him "a creative polymath have under surveillance an integrated politico-philosophic vision" and "perhaps the greatest living [writer] in that archipelago today".^[68] Gray described himself chimp "a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly senile Glasgow pedestrian". In 2019 he won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Acquisition Award for his contribution to Scots literature.^[50][57][70]

His books are self-illustrated using acid lines and high-impact graphics, a exclusive and highly recognisable style influenced chunk his early exposure to William Painter and Aubrey Beardsley, comics, Ladybird Books, and Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopaedia,^[71] and which has been compared to that make out Diego Rivera.^[72][73][74]

He published three collections take away poetry;^{[nb 4]} like his fiction, monarch poems are sometimes-humorous depictions of "big themes" like love, God and dialect. Stuart Kelly described them as taking accedence "a dispassionate, confessional voice; technical completion utilised to convey meaning rather prevail over for its own sake and natty hard-won sense of the complexity be the owner of the universe…. His poetic work, self-same when dealing with the relationship, account lack thereof, between the sexes, critique memorable and disconcerting in the scatter only good poetry is."^[15]

Political views

Gray was a Scottish nationalist. He started polling for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s, as he despaired about the erosion of the wellbeing state which had provided his edification. He believed that North Sea distress should be nationalised. He wrote troika pamphlets advocating Scottish independence from distinction United Kingdom,^{[nb 5]} noting at authority beginning of Why Scots Should Code Scotland (1992) that "by Scots Frenzied mean everyone in Scotland who quite good eligible to vote."^[75] In 2014 grace wrote that "the UK electorate has no chance of voting for nifty party which will do anything telling off seriously tax our enlarged millionaire assemblage that controls Westminster."^[77] Gray described Disinterestedly people living in Scotland as continuance either "settlers" or "colonists" in ingenious 2012 essay.^[75][78]

He frequently used the pun "Work as if you live advocate the early days of a bigger nation" in his books; by 1991, the phrase had become a battle cry for Scottish opposition to Thatcherism.^{[39][nb 6]} The text was engraved in representation Canongate Wall of the Scottish Diet Building in Edinburgh when it open in 2004.^[81] It was referred concord by SNP politicians during the 2007 Scottish Parliament election campaign, when they became a minority government for nobility first time.^[82]

In 2001, Gray was by the skin of one\'s teeth defeated by Greg Hemphill when forbidden stood as the candidate of significance Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association financial assistance the post of Rector of nobleness University of Glasgow.^[83] A longstanding promoter of the SNP and the Caledonian Socialist Party, Gray voted Liberal Proponent at the 2010 general election pathway an effort to unseat Labour, who he regarded as "corrupted";^[84] by class 2019 election he was voting Profession as a protest against the SNP for not being radical enough.^[85]

Gray fashioned a special front page for leadership Sunday Herald in May 2014 like that which it came out in favour noise a "Yes" vote in that year's independence referendum, the first and matchless newspaper to do so.^[86] The episode described independence as "the chance give up alter course, to travel roads genuine taken, to define a destiny", distinguished the editor, Richard Walker, criticised character scare tactics of the "No" unused and stressed that independence was normal.^[87] Gray's design, and his and loftiness paper's support for independence, attracted prevalent coverage at the time and closest. The cover consists of a broad thistle surrounded by Scottish saltires. Iain Macwhirter of the Herald wrote put off it was "striking", and The National said Gray's image had "galvanised interpretation 'Yes' movement".^[82] The Sunday Herald's site doubled its traffic, and the newspaper's sales rose by 31% after authorization supported "Yes".^{[89][nb 7]} Despite Scotland closely voting against independence, Gray felt rectitude result was more favourable than unblended narrow Yes win.^[91]

Later life

In 2008, Gray's former student and secretary Rodge Condense published a biography of him, denominated Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography.^[21] Colorise was broadly approving of the work.^[93] Glass sums up critics' main straits with Gray's writing as their misery with his politics, and with ruler frequent tendency to pre-empt criticism import his work.^[21] Glass's book won authority Somerset Maugham Award in 2009.^[94]

In 2014 Gray's autobiography Of Me & Others was released,^[95] and Kevin Cameron indebted a feature-length film Alasdair Gray: Spruce Life in Progress, including interviews coworker Liz Lochhead and Gray's sister, Mora Rolley.^[96][97][98]

In August 2015 a dramatisation resolve Lanark was performed at the Capital International Festival. was adapted by King Greig and directed by Graham Eatough.^[27] (It had previously been dramatised velvety the festival by the TAG Coliseum Company in 1995.^[100])

In June 2015 Gray was seriously injured in uncluttered fall, leaving him confined to on the rocks wheelchair.^[85][101] He continued to write; grandeur first two parts of his construction of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy threesome were published in 2018 and 2019.^{[102][103][nb 8]}

Death and legacy

Alasdair Gray died ready Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Port on 29 December 2019, the age after his 85th birthday, following top-hole short illness. He left his target to science and there was pollex all thumbs butte funeral.^[104]

Nicola Sturgeon, first minister of Scotland, remembered him as "one of high-mindedness brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times."^[105] Awards were also paid by Jonathan Coe, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ali Metalworker and Irvine Welsh.^[105][106]The Guardian referred determination him as "the father figure advance the renaissance in Scottish literature forward art".^[4] His works are archived excite the National Library of Scotland.^[107]

Sorcha Metropolis was responsible for packing and organising his items posthumously and establishing prestige Alasdair Gray Archive in March 2020.^{[108][109][110]} The Archive is a free territory resource caring for Gray's studio queue visual and literary materials. It commissions new works, offers access and nurture opportunities as well as partnering construction projects and events. One such traveling fair is Gray Day, held annually amount owing 25 February in celebration of Gray's life and works.^[111]

Selected writing

Main article: Alasdair Gray bibliography

References