Gray, Alasdair James
Gray, Alasdair James ( 1934 – ),Scottish novelist, playwright, and painter, born in Glasgow, educated at Whitehill Secondary School and the Glasgow School of Art. For several years he worked as an art teacher and then as a theatrical scene-painter. His début novel, Lanark: A Life in Four Books, a vast picaresque fable in which Glasgow is reinvented as the apocalyptic Unthank, was not published until 1981 (although begun several years earlier), but immediately established him as a leading figure in contemporary Scottish writing. Gray's fiction, in which fantasy is given a firmly realistic underpinning, is inventively unconventional in both structure and style and eclectic in its references. At the same time it displays a sharp, and at times savage, turn of humour and deploys its effects on a grand scale. Unlikely Stories, Mostly appeared in 1983 , followed by 1982, Janine ( 1984 ), the...
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