1982 Janine (45 page)

Alasdair Gray was born in Glasgow in 1934. He was educated at Whitehill Senior Secondary School and studied drawing and painting at the Glasgow School of Art from 1952–7. After Art School he worked as a part-time art teacher and on commissions for portraits and murals. During this time he was also writing short stories and a semi-autobiographical novel which changed and developed through several drafts over the course of twenty years, to become
Lanark
. After training at Jordanhill in 1960 he taught art in Glasgow schools for the next two years before going on to make a difficult living as an artist, a writer, a scene painter and part-time lecturer. Gray married Inge Sørensen in 1962 and the couple had a son in 1964 but were divorced in 1970. In 1968 his play
The Fall of Kelvin Walker
was broadcast on BBC TV. In the 1970s Gray was attending Glasgow University lecturer Philip Hobsbaum's creative writing sessions, in a group which included Tom Leonard, Liz Lochhead and James Kelman. During this period he wrote several plays for radio and television, some of which were done on stage, while he continued to paint and to work on murals. (Some of his murals can still be seen at Palace Rigg Nature Reserve in Cumbernauld, in Abbots House local history museum in Dunfermline, and in the Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in Glasgow.) Gray's first novel,
Lanark
, was published by Canongate in 1981 to widespread critical acclaim, followed by short stories in
Unlikely Stories, Mostly
(1983), his second major novel 1982,
Janine
(1984),
The Fall of Kelvin Walker
as a novel (1985), and
Lean Tales
(with Agnes Owens and James Kelman) in the same year.

Gray's work is characterised by an exuberant imaginative energy, which uses fantasy and fabulation to good-humoured effect, while never losing sight of his darker and more critical
sense of the effects of personal, cultural, and political alienation in the modern world. Technically his books make free use of meta-narrative games, typographical effects, mock scholarly addenda and his own fine and complex illustrations.

Gray produced a brief
Saltire Self Portrait
in 1988 and a collection of poems,
Old Negatives
, appeared in 1989, with
McGrotty and Ludmilla
(the novel version of a play written in 1975) and the novel
Something Leather
in 1990. A wholly original revision of the Frankenstein theme featured in the novel
Poor Things
(1992) and further short stories were published as
Ten Tales True and Tall
(1993), with two further books
A History
Maker
(1994) and
Mavis Belfrage
(1996). A polemical essay
Why
Scots Should Rule Scotland
was published in 1992 and revised in 1997. His most recent works are
The Book of Prefaces: A History
of English Literature from the 7th to the 20th Century
(2000) and
A Short Survey of Classic Scottish Writing
(2001). Gray's fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages throughout the world, including Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Japanese, Swedish and Serbo-Croatian.