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Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography

This book seeks to forge an original path for modern biography, responding to the novelist and academic Will Self’s call for writers to treat biography as a ‘fun house mirror’. This work is a hybrid, partly being an orthodox, distanced biography of the artist, but partly being a collage of personal, subjective portraits of the artist as an old man, having been composed during 4 years of extensive tracking of the man and the work. Gray is one of Britain’s most revered names as a novelist, and increasingly as an artist too. Mine was the first and is the definitive work of his life, having been awarded the Somerset Maugham Prize for Non-Fiction in 2009. It has been widely cited since, and I will be a leading contributor at the Glasgow University International Conference on Alasdair Gray in 2014, delivering a new paper which seeks to define the period in Gray’s life since my book was first published.