Author and artist Alasdair Gray, "who blazed a trail for contemporary Scottish fiction with his experimental novels," died December 29, the Guardian reported. He was 85. Gray came to fiction late, publishing his first novel Lanark at the age of 46 in 1981. "As his literary reputation increased, winning both the Guardian fiction prize and the Whitbread novel award in 1992, the elaborate illustrations he created for his books began to draw attention to the pictorial art Gray had been producing all along. The stream of commissions for murals and portraits gradually increased, and he finished his career as one of Scotland's most admired and versatile artists."
Calling Gray "a magnificent talent, a modern-day William Blake," author Ali Smith observed: "He was an artist in every form. He was a renaissance man. His generosity and brilliance in person--felt by everyone who knew him even a little--were a source of astonishing and liberating warmth. The few times I met him in life, he was all these things in a unique combination of polite, frank, detached (or maybe more truly differently attached), sanguine, many-voiced, wise, warm, kind, hilarious, acutely truth-telling, uncompromisingly articulate."
Gray's 30 novels and collections include Unlikely Stories, Mostly (1983), Janine (1982), Poor Things (1992), and illustrated translations of Dante's Hell (2018) and Purgatory (2019).
"What sad news this is that Alasdair Gray is gone," Francis Bickmore, Gray's editor and publishing director at Canongate, told the Bookseller. "It seems hard to believe that Alasdair was mortal and might ever leave us. No one single figure has left such a varied legacy--or missed so many deadlines--as Alasdair Gray. At least through Gray's phenomenal body of work he leaves a legacy that will outlive us all. His voice of solidarity and compassion for his fellow citizens, and his forward-looking vision is cause for great celebration and remembrance."
Friend and fellow writer Ian Rankin told BBC Scotland: "He could take something very personal to him--his background growing up in Glasgow for example--and make it that people around the world wanted to read it. He was part of that thing about taking Scotland out of the kailyard, writing sort of misty stories of Highland villages. Suddenly you were writing about things that meant stuff, writing politically, writing about your own experiences.... His books were beautiful, they were crafted, they were elegant. He had a sense of fun, he was mischievous, he had this huge intellect but he was a 'lad of pairts'--he could do a little bit of everything and he did it all well."
Last month, when Gray won the inaugural Saltire Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to Scottish literature, the judges said: "For over 40 years, Alasdair Gray's plentiful and diverse work has influenced writers and the literary scene worldwide."