Alasdair Gray
Alasdair Gray describes himself as a ‘self-employed verbal and pictorial artist’. He was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, and trained as a painter at the Glasgow School of Art. He worked as a part-time art teacher, muralist and theatrical scene painter before becoming a full-time painter and playwright. Later he wrote fiction, illustrating many of his own books. His highly-acclaimed first novel Lanark was published in 1981. It won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and the Scottish Book of the Year award.
His other fiction includes 1982 Janine (1984), The Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties (1985), Something Leather (1990), and McGrotty and Ludmilla (1990). Poor Things (1992), winner of the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, takes the form of a series of historical documents. His collections of short stories include Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), winner of the 1983 Cheltenham Prize, and Ten Tales Tall and True (1993), and he is the editor of The Book of Prefaces (2000).
He has also written for stage, radio and television. In 2001 he became, with Tom Leonard and James Kelman, joint Professor of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde University. His latest book is Old Men in Love (2007), shortlisted for the 2008 Catherine Maclean Prize.
For fiction enquiries, please contact Zoe Waldie at Rogers, Coleridge & White .
Books by Alasdair Gray
Collected Verse
This book will bring together for the first time poems from Alasdair Gray’s published volumes, along with new and previously unpublished poetry. The book is designed and illustrated by the author.
October 2010
Two Ravens Press
A Gray Playbook
A Gray Play Book of long and short plays for stage, puppet-theatre, radio and television, acted between 1956 and 2009, with an unused opera libretto, a film script of the novel Poor Things and excerpts from the pictorial storyboard of the novel Lanark by Alasdair Gray.
This collection brings together some of Alasdair Gray’s best plays. For the first time ever 22 of his works (stage plays, radio scripts and film and television scripts) have been gathered together in one significant volume. This exciting work includes the unabridged scripts of four of his most famous dramas: The Fall of Kelvin Walker (1967), Mavis Belfridge (1968), McGrotty and Ludmilla (1975) and Working Legs (1997), ‘A Play for People Without Them’. These are combined with four one-act sexual comedies written in the ‘60s and ‘70s; The Loss of Golden Silence, Dialogue, Homeward Bound and Sand Lang and Miss Watson.
A Gray Play Book follows the creation of the playwright genius from his first work, written at age 11, to the 2008 one-act play Voices in the Dark. Plus an intriguing glimpse at the, as yet unmade, Lanark movie with sections of the original storyboard.
September 2009
Luath Press
Fleck
The novelist Alasdair Gray was once known as a playwright. In 2007 he began writing a modern verse translation of Goethe’s Tragedy of Faust, and after the first act found the Devil lead the hero into a twenty-first century Goethe never imagined. This required a change of names, so the play is now Fleck, a comedy.
November 2008
Two Ravens Press

