Responding to Alasdair Gray’s LANARK
15 April, University of Glasgow – free, ticketed
Rachelle Atalla in conversation with Rodge Glass, presented by The Alasdair Gray Archive. Rachelle Atalla will read from her newly commissioned short story, “Waste Management”, which delves into Glasgow’s hidden subterranean layers, drawing inspiration from LANARK & the city’s sanitation infrastructure
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/responding-to-alasdair-grays-lanark-tickets-1984371725248
Bookclub: Alan Cumming on Alasdair Gray’s LANARK
Currently available on BBC Sounds.
Recorded at the at the 2026 Pitlochry Winter Words Festival, this special episode of Bookclub celebrates Alasdair Gray’s 1981 masterpiece, LANARK, with the actor Alan Cumming, who is the voice of the new audiobook recently released by @canongatebooks
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002s2yx
#Scottish #literature #Lanark #novel #AlasdairGray #AlanCumming
“Novels like LANARK do what all the best art does: awaken your imaginative capacities without swallowing them whole. It does not give you answers, but it does give you the right questions.”
—Stephen Durkan: “LANARK: an escape to reality”
https://stephendurkan.wordpress.com/2021/02/25/lanark-an-escape-to-reality/
#Scottish #literature #AlasdairGray #GrayDay #Lanark #fantasy
“LANARK is a strange, experimental book that immediately thrusts the reader into a weird world with glimmers of familiarity”
—author Rodge Glass & the International Anthony Burgess Foundation discuss Alasdair Gray’s LANARK
https://www.anthonyburgess.org/blog-posts/ninety-nine-novels-lanark-by-alasdair-gray/
#Scottish #literature #AlasdairGray #GrayDay #Lanark #AnthonyBurgess
In 1984, Anthony Burgess published Ninety-Nine Novels, a selection of his favourite novels in English since 1939. The list is typically idiosyncratic, and shows the breadth of Burgess’s interest in fiction. This podcast, by the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, explores the novels on Burgess’s list with the help of writers, critics and other special guests. […]
“LANARK, in common with all great books, is still, and always will be, an act of resistance. It is part of the system of whispers and sedition and direct communion, one voice to another, we call literature.”
—Janice Galloway, writing in 2002
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/oct/12/fiction.alasdairgray
Envoi
Prof Alan Riach, University of Glasgow – who appears, briefly & fictionally, in Alasdair Gray’s 2007 novel OLD MEN IN LOVE (although not, I should add, as an old man in love) – discusses LANARK at our 2022 Schools Conference
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTCGw6e_OSI&list=PLEP9HxY4X7WaVgzFyI3JdP1V-XAopXEgR
“Taken together, the four prints underscore the oft-disputed unity of LANARK, as well as the sheer will of Gray’s effort to portray the individual’s capabilities for art & love against the backdrop of the modern industrialized state”
—David Auerbach on Alasdair Gray’s art
8/8
https://www.waggish.org/2020/alasdair-grays-lanark-the-four-frontispieces/
#Scottish #literature #AlasdairGray #GrayDay #Lanark #visualart #print #printmaking #illustration
(although we’re still waiting for “The Provision Merchant as Agent of Evil in Scottish Literature from Galt to Gunn” tbh – though there’s no particular rush)
7/8
Which academic will finally dare to write the long-awaited paper “The Dynamics of Interbeing and Monological Imperatives in Alasdair Gray’s LANARK: A Study in Psychic Transrelational Gender Modes”?
6/8
The second half of Gray’s slogan draws on the Bible – specifically, the description of the sea-monster Leviathan (Job 41.34):
“He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.”
Alasdair Gray’s LANARK: Calvin & Hobbes, avant la lettre
5/8
Assoc for Scottish Literature
