Alasdair Gray (1934–2019)

Gray's career, major works, and public political activity are extensively documented in his own writing, in contemporary press coverage, and in Rodge Glass's authorised biography, and are treated here as established. The 2012 "Settlers and Colonists" essay controversy involved genuinely disputed questions — what Gray intended, whether the language was reasonably read as bigoted, and how significant the episode should be in assessing his legacy — and is presented here with the documented facts of what he wrote, who objected and why, and how he responded, without declaring a final verdict.

---

A Glasgow childhood and a long artistic apprenticeship

Alasdair Gray was born in 1934 in Riddrie, in Glasgow's east end, the son of Alexander Gray, a box-factory worker who had been wounded in the First World War, and Amy Gray, who worked in a clothing warehouse. His family was evacuated during the Second World War before settling for a time in Yorkshire. Gray showed early creative promise, appearing on BBC children's radio at age eleven reading Aesop's Fables, and later edited his school magazine at Whitehill Secondary School. His mother died of cancer when he was eighteen, a loss biographers and Gray himself connected to recurring themes of maternal absence in his later fiction.

He trained formally as a visual artist, studying Design and Mural Painting at Glasgow School of Art from 1952 to 1957, and it was during these years that he began drafting what would eventually become Lanark — initially titled "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Scot." He completed a first version in 1963, only to have it rejected by a literary agency, and the book would not reach print for another eighteen years. In the intervening decades he worked as an art teacher, painted theatrical scenery for Glasgow's Pavilion and Citizens Theatres, and built a reputation as a serious, versatile visual artist — producing public murals, including an early work for the Scottish-USSR Friendship Society, and later major commissions at Hillhead subway station and the Òran Mór arts venue, where his large ceiling mural depicts Adam and Eve embracing above modern Glaswegians. From 1977 to 1978, funded by a Labour government scheme, he served as Glasgow's official "artist recorder," producing hundreds of drawings of the city's people and places now held at Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Lanark and the revival of Scottish fiction

Lanark: A Life in Four Books, finally published in 1981, interweaves two narratives: a realist account of Duncan Thaw, a young artist coming of age in 1950s Glasgow, and a dystopian fantasy following the character Lanark through the nightmarish city of Unthank, governed by opaque and arbitrary institutional power. The novel's combination of realism, science fiction, and fable, together with Gray's own distinctive typography and illustrations (he designed the book himself), drew comparisons to Kafka, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the fabulism of Borges and Calvino.

Its impact on Scottish letters was immediate and lasting. A 2016 BBC public poll named it the third-best Scottish novel of all time, and it is widely credited with helping revive a distinctively confident Scottish literary voice after a relatively fallow period — directly inspiring a generation of writers including Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Alan Warner, Iain Banks, and Irvine Welsh, several of whom have spoken and written about its influence on their own work. Despite this critical standing, it did not make Gray wealthy, and money troubles recurred throughout his career; around 2000 he applied to the Scottish Artists' Benevolent Association for financial support while living largely on book-sales income.

A restless, genre-crossing body of work

Gray followed Lanark with a stream of formally adventurous fiction. Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), a short-story collection spanning work written as early as 1951, won the Cheltenham Prize for Literature. 1982, Janine (1984) — which Gray himself regarded as his best novel — is a stream-of-consciousness narrative following Jock McLeish, a middle-aged, alcohol-dependent security supervisor, partly inspired by Hugh MacDiarmid's long poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle; its frank treatment of sadomasochistic fantasy divided critics, and the novelist Anthony Burgess, who had earlier called Gray "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott," found this particular book "juvenile."

His most commercially and critically successful novel, Poor Things (1992), reimagines Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in Victorian Glasgow, following the scientist Godwin Baxter as he reanimates a suicide victim by implanting her unborn child's brain — a story that doubles as a meditation on class, gender, and Scotland's own colonial and imperial entanglements. It won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the London Review of Books called it his funniest novel and "a welcome return to form." Its 2023 film adaptation, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, brought Gray's work to a vastly larger international audience and won multiple Academy Awards, three years after Gray's own death. He went on to write A History Maker (1994), set in a 23rd-century matriarchal utopia that curdles, and The Book of Prefaces (2000), an idiosyncratic, heavily annotated anthology tracing the history of English-language literature from Cædmon to Wilfred Owen.

A committed nationalist and republican socialist

Gray's politics were not incidental to his art but central to how he understood his own work, once describing his fiction as trying "to seduce the reader by disguising themselves as sensational entertainment, but are propaganda for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parliament." He began voting for the Scottish National Party in the 1970s, motivated in part by concern over erosion of the welfare state that had funded his own education, and argued consistently for nationalising North Sea oil revenue and for Scottish independence, publishing three pamphlets on the subject, including Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (1992), in which he defined Scottish identity civically rather than ethnically: "by Scots I mean everyone in Scotland who is eligible to vote." His political loyalties were not simply tribal — he voted Liberal Democrat in 2010 specifically to unseat a Labour Party he considered "corrupted," and by 2019 was voting Labour again as a protest against the SNP for what he saw as insufficient radicalism.

His best-known political contribution is linguistic rather than electoral: the epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation," adapted from a line by the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, became an anti-Thatcherite rallying phrase from around 1991 and was engraved on the Canongate Wall outside the new Scottish Parliament building when it opened in 2004, later invoked by SNP politicians during election campaigns. Ahead of the 2014 independence referendum, he designed the front page for the Sunday Herald when it became the only Scottish newspaper to formally endorse a "Yes" vote — a large thistle surrounded by saltires that the paper's editor called "striking" and that was credited with doubling the paper's web traffic and lifting sales by 31 percent. Although the referendum result went 55–45 against independence, Gray reportedly considered the outcome more favourable to the cause than a narrow Yes victory would have been, given how close the result had come.

The "Settlers and Colonists" controversy

In 2012, Gray published an essay distinguishing two categories of English people working in Scottish cultural institutions: "settlers," whom he characterised as long-term contributors genuinely invested in Scottish culture, and "colonists," career administrators he accused of treating Scottish posts as short-term stepping stones. The essay explicitly suggested the pattern extended beyond the arts into other Scottish professions.

The response was immediate and serious, not a passing social-media flare-up: politicians and commentators objected strongly to the essay's language, and some public figures went so far as to call Gray a "racist bigot" over his characterisation of English professionals in Scotland. Gray revised the essay in response, removing a line that had broadened the claim beyond the arts — "I think Scottish folk in other professions will know settlers and colonists with similar attitudes" — and rebalancing the text to give more weight to positive examples of "settlers," including reclassifying the theatre director Vicky Featherstone, who had supported his work, from "colonist" to "good settler." Gray said the removal of the broader claim "may have been an accident," maintained that the underlying settler/colonist distinction remained valid, and stated plainly that he did not believe the charge of racism.

Gray's biographer and former secretary, Rodge Glass, who published an authorised biography of Gray in 2008, has characterised the episode and similar criticism of Gray as stemming partly from discomfort with his politics and from "his frequent tendency to pre-empt criticism in his work" — itself a notable critical judgment worth reporting rather than resolving. The episode remains a genuinely disputed part of Gray's legacy: it is neither erased from his record nor treated as having defined it, and readers encountering strong claims in either direction — that it was straightforwardly bigoted, or that it was wholly misunderstood — should be aware the documented facts support a more contested picture than either extreme.

A late flowering, and death

Gray continued working into his eighties despite a serious fall in 2015 that left him using a wheelchair, publishing verse translations of Dante's Inferno (2018) and Purgatorio (2019) in his final years. He died on 29 December 2019 at Glasgow's Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, one day after his 85th birthday, having left his body to science and requested no funeral. Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, called him "one of the brightest intellectual and creative lights Scotland has known in modern times," and The Guardian described him as "the father figure of the renaissance in Scottish literature and art." Tributes came from writers including Jonathan Coe, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Ali Smith, and Irvine Welsh. He had earlier that year received the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award. His literary and artistic archive is held at the National Library of Scotland, and the independent Alasdair Gray Archive, established in 2020, continues to promote access to and new work drawing on his legacy; "Gray Day" is marked annually on 25 February.

---

• Gray spent almost twenty years writing Lanark before it was finally published in 1981.
• He designed and illustrated Lanark himself, drawing on his training as a visual artist rather than leaving the book's look to a publisher.
• His ceiling mural at Òran Mór in Glasgow, depicting Adam and Eve above modern Glaswegians, remains one of the largest artworks of its kind in Scotland.
• His epigram "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation" is permanently engraved on the Canongate Wall outside the Scottish Parliament.
• Anthony Burgess once called him "the most important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott" — and also called one of his novels "juvenile."
• Poor Things, his most commercially successful novel, became an Oscar-winning film only after his death.
• He left his body to science and requested no funeral.
• He died one day after turning 85.

---

• disputed Whether the 2012 "Settlers and Colonists" essay reflected genuine prejudice or a defensible, if bluntly expressed, distinction about cultural institutions is not resolved by the available record; both the strongest criticisms and Gray's own denial are documented here without a final verdict imposed.
• Myth: Gray was primarily a novelist who also painted as a hobby. Reality: He trained formally as a visual artist first, worked professionally as a muralist and illustrator throughout his life, and considered his visual and literary work to be part of a single creative practice.
• Clarify: Poor Things' Academy Award-winning 2023 film adaptation arrived after Gray's death in 2019; he did not live to see its international success.

---