"Alasdair Gray," writes Gray at the beginning of his tale A History Maker (1994), "is a fat old asthmatic Glaswegian who lives by painting and writing." Gray's summation does not intimate the extremely high critical regard in which he has been held since the appearance in 1981 of Lanark: A Life in Four Books. Gray had begun writing the novel in the early 1950s while a student at the Glasgow School of Art, and on its publication he found himself touted by Anthony Burgess and many others as the first great Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott. He remains a vital and towering figure on the increasingly populated Scottish literary and artistic landscape, writing everything from fantastic historical fiction to plays, poetry, and political polemics, and illustrating his own books and those of others with his dark and distinctive pen drawings.

Alasdair James Gray was born in Glasgow on 28 December...