{"id":1953,"date":"2007-12-04T17:19:14","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T17:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/connectreflect.wordpress.com\/2007\/12\/04\/alasdair-gray\/"},"modified":"2007-12-04T17:19:14","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T17:19:14","slug":"alasdair-gray","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/?p=1953","title":{"rendered":"Alasdair Gray"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Aladair Gray was born in Riddrie<\/a>, east Glasgow<\/a>. His father had been wounded in the First World War<\/a> and worked at the time in a factory, while his mother worked in a shop. During the Second World War<\/a>, Gray was evacuated to Perthshire<\/a> and then Lanarkshire<\/a>, experiences which he drew on in his later fiction. The family lived on a council estate<\/a>, and Gray received his education from a combination of state education<\/a>, public libraries<\/a>, and public service broadcasting<\/a>: “the kind of education British governments now consider useless, especially for British working class children”, as he later commented. He studied at Glasgow School of Art<\/a> from 1952 to 1957, and taught there from 1958 to 1962. It was as a student that he first began what would become the novel Lanark<\/em>.<\/p>\n

After his graduation, Gray worked as a scene and portrait painter, as well as an independent artist and writer. His first plays were broadcast on radio and television in 1968. Between 1972 and 1974, he participated in a writing group organised by Philip Hobsbaum<\/a>, where he met James Kelman<\/a>, Liz Lochhead<\/a>, and Tom Leonard<\/a>. From 1977 to 1979, he was Writer in Residence at Glasgow University. In 2001, he became, with Tom Leonard and James Kelman, joint Professor of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde Universities.<\/p>\n

Gray illustrates his books himself, and has produced many murals<\/a> as well as paintings. One of his longest-lasting murals can be seen, for free, in the Ubiquitous Chip<\/a> restaurant in the West End of Glasgow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2001, he stood as the candidate of the Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association<\/a> for the post of Rector<\/a> of the University of Glasgow<\/a>, but was eventually narrowly defeated by Greg Hemphill<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He has been married twice: firstly to Inge Sorenson (1961-1970), and since 1991 to Morag McAlpine. He has one son, Andrew, born in 1964. He still lives in the West End of Glasgow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

He produced the ceiling mural for The Auditorium of the Oran Mor on Byres Road<\/a> in Glasgow, one of the largest pieces of art in Scotland.<\/p>\n

Gray’s famous quote, “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation”, is engraved in the Canongate Wall<\/a> of the Scottish Parliament building<\/a>. His name was infamously mispelled as ‘Alastair’ on the attribution.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1953","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1953\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shaunbelcher.com\/news\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}