In the run-up to Gray Day, Dallas has been posting video clips titled Gray Of The Day in which various people read from Lanark. Among those who have recorded a reading is Katie Bruce, Producer Curator at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow and one of the people involved in that 2014 retrospective. Ferguson, Brian (19 May 2013). "Alasdair Gray puts Mor of us in the picture". The Scotsman . Retrieved 6 January 2020. Pre-read blurbs describe this as a story about how even though love is always flawed, humans always seek to find love. This story didn’t seem focused on love at all. Yes there are some failed attempts by the main character to find love. But none of the characters he expresses love for are fully fleshed out. For a story to be about love, you need to feel the characters feel love for each other. The primary relationships are mostly hostile with such spotty affection and so one-sided in development that the only exposition about love that I saw is the main character’s desperate need to believe that he deserved it. And his constant frustration that women he directed his affection toward didn’t supply it as he desired. All the elements that were supposedly some grand theme around “love” seemed more like

Williamson, Kevin (2009). "Language and culture in a rediscovered Scotland" (PDF). In Perryman, Mark (ed.). Breaking up Britain: Four Nations after a Union. London: Lawrence & Wishart. pp.53–67. ISBN 978-1-905007-96-7. Archived (PDF) from the original on 21 February 2011. This new Hunterian exhibition is dedicated to the work of renowned Scottish writer and artist Alasdair Gray (1934–2019).Moores, Phil; Cunningham, A. E. (2002). Alasdair Gray: Critical Appreciations and a Bibliography. London: British Library. ISBN 978-0-7123-1129-8. Self, Will (12 January 2006). "Alasdair Gray: An Introduction". will-self.com. Archived from the original on 21 May 2014 . Retrieved 21 May 2014. His Collected Verse (2010) was followed by Every Short Story 1951-2012. Hell and Purgatory, the first two parts of his version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, “decorated and Englished in prosaic verse”, appeared in 2018 and 2019. In November Gray received the inaugural Saltire Society Scottish Lifetime Achievement award.

Inspired by Gauguin’s ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?’, Alasdair used the three wedge spaces created by our Auditorium roof beams to both pose and reply to Gauguin’s philosophical questions. Cameron, Lucinda (29 December 2019). "Tributes to 'master of creativity' Alasdair Gray". Belfast Telegraph . Retrieved 7 January 2020.a b c Glass, Rodge (28 June 2018). "Introduction to Alasdair Gray Exhibition 'Paintings, Drawings & Notebooks' at the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities, London, June 2018-January 2019". Archived from the original on 3 December 2021 . Retrieved 12 January 2020. In June 2015 Gray was seriously injured in a fall, leaving him confined to a wheelchair. [81] [96] He continued to write; the first two parts of his translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy trilogy were published in 2018 and 2019. [97] [98] [nb 8] Death and legacy [ edit ] Scotland produced, in Hugh MacDiarmid, the greatest poet of the century (or so some believe); it was time Scotland produced a shattering work of fiction in the modern idiom. This is it.” Alasdair Gray". The Guardian. London. 22 July 2008. Archived from the original on 11 May 2008 . Retrieved 6 January 2020. I wanted very much to love this book, which was probably my first mistake. I had heard a lot of extremely complimentary things about how it was the most unusual, eccentric and meaningful novel various people had read for ages, and I probably came to it with rather exaggerated hopes. Anyway, it's good, but it's also flawed, as to be fair the author himself admits in a rather interesting confessional Epilogue.

The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1985) and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990) were based on television scripts Gray had written in the 1960s and 1970s, and describe the adventures of Scottish protagonists in London. [4] [35] Something Leather (1990) explores female sexuality; Gray regretted giving it its provocative title. [49] He called it his weakest book, and he excised the sexual fantasy material and retitled it Glaswegians when he included it in his compendium Every Short Story 1951-2012. [50] 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 embarked on what would become his novel Lanark.Gray was a Scottish nationalist. He started voting for the Scottish National Party (SNP) in the 1970s, as he despaired about the erosion of the welfare state which had provided his education. He believed that North Sea oil should be nationalised. He wrote three pamphlets advocating Scottish independence from England, [nb 5] noting at the beginning of Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992) that "by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is eligible to vote." [71] [72] In 2014 he wrote that "the UK electorate has no chance of voting for a party which will do anything to seriously tax our enlarged millionaire class that controls Westminster." [73] Gray described English people living in Scotland as being either "settlers" or "colonists" in a 2012 essay. [71] [74] 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. I read Alasdair's part hopelessly biographical, part darkest fantasy Lanark in the spring of 2007. I could not read it again. In those days I'd identified the character(s) Lanark/Thaw to the person I was in love with (especially the artist parts). (I bet I'm the only person who is gonna say that about THIS book.) Those feelings changed (boy did they ever) and I'd not be able to bear being reminded of those feelings (as they probably should have always been) in their new light. I feel kinda crazy sometimes. This is a crazy book, though, so at least I didn't wander into some cookie-cutter sane land.