Born in 1934, Alasdair Gray graduated in design and mural painting from Glasgow School of Art. Since 1981, when Lanark was published by Canongate, he has written, designed and illustrated seven novels, several books of short stories, a collection of his stage, radio and TV plays and a book of his visual art, A Life in Pictures. In his own words, 'Alasdair Gray is a fat, spectacled, balding, increasingly old Glaswegian pedestrian who has mainly lived by writing and designing books, most of them fiction.