Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray has a devoted and loyal fan base. Rodge Glass has been inspired by Gray's work and the inventive approach to biography taken by Jonathan Coe in his Samuel Johnson Prize winning biography of B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant. 'Glass is Gray's perfect biographer' Guardian

Glass plays Boswell to Gray's Johnson in this first (and very likely last), imaginative yet rigorous biography of Scotland's greatest living novelist.Alasdair Gray, author of the modern classics Lanark, Poor Things and 1982, Janine, is without doubt Scotland's greatest living novelist. Since trying (unsuccessfully) to buy him a drink in 1998, Rodge Glass, first tutee and then secretary to the author, takes on the role of biographer, charting Gray's life from unpublished and unrecognised son of a box-maker to septuagenarian "little grey deity" (as Will Self has called him). A Jewish Mancunian Boswell to Gray's Johnson, Glass seamlessly weaves a chronological narrative of his subject's life into his own diary of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, to create a vibrant and wonderfully textured portrait of a literary great.