Happy Birthday Alasdair Gray
Scottish genius
Dear Alasdair
Have a great 77th birthday..
And thank you for everything from Lanark (which in 1982 changed my life and showed me what great literature could aspire to be) to Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (which has helped prepare the ground for what comes next) to the Bella masthead at the top of this page (which has been well borrowed in recent days).
Keep working as if you live in the early days of a better nation whose birth you will have helped nudge and inspire.more than most.
There have been happy returns on our part. Wishing you many more of the same.
With love and affection.
Happy birthday Alasdair, the two books mentioned are the only two of his that I have read, but like the writer, they were very formative! Happy birthday
Nice comment Kevin, it was the masthead that caught my attention when I first visited the site, glad to say that the articles have more or less matched it ever since.
I also agree, I think he is a genius.
Slaintie + 77 …
All the best to Alasdair Gray on his 77th birthday.
We should do more to recognise and celebrate our writers artists, and poets when they are alive,we tend to wait until they have died.
As a writer and artist Alasdair Gray has given us so much,we look forward to more.
Happy Birthday to a brilliant and very lovely man. He dropped into an Open Day at WASPS Studios in King Street a couple of years back, looked at some children’s books I had written which were superbly illustrated by Inverkip artist Phil Burns, and promptly purchased a full set. All the very best, Alasdair.
I haven’t read any of his books (I’m not a fiction reader). Yet, I seem to know his name all over the place.
His ‘better nation’ quote is inspiring but more inspiring than most such quotes as it inspires one to continue to work towards something. Most quotes begin and end with a finality of statement.
We need to keep working, doing our part, in whatever way we can, towards a better nation.
“Man is the pie that bakes and eats itself and the receipt is separation”… from Lanark, p411, so clear, so deep… undoubtedly, one of the greatest novels of the XX century…