© MURDO MACLEOD
Alasdair Gray is out of the good whisky. We are in his kitchen in the ground floor flat of a pretty Glasgow tenement. The 84-year-old sits in his wheelchair while I fix him a drink. “You’re out of the Talisker, Alasdair,” I tell him. “Is Bell’s okay?” It is. He has me fetch him a mug and add a little water, then takes the bottle himself. Clearly, he suspects my measures would be insufficiently generous.
Born in Glasgow in 1934, Gray studied design and mural painting at the city’s School of Art, adding fiction-writing to his artistic studies before the end of his degree. In the years since, he has written nine novels and countless short stories as well as poetry, plays, essays and—most recently—a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Long revered in Scotland, Gray has an epigraph engraved on the Canongate wall of Holyrood in Edinburgh: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” Venerated in Scotland, Gray is much less well known down south. In 2003 the Guardian described him as “largely ignored,” with interviewer Euan Ferguson bemoaning that mentions of his name in “literary London” are met with “strange looks.”