Alasdair Gray: A Secretary's Biography - Launch Event with Rodge Glass

Blackwell's Bookshop
South Bridge, Edinburgh
6.30pm
Free but ticketed

Alasdair Gray was not always the rapidly ageing, fat Glasgow pedestrian he likes to describe on the inside leaf of his books. There was once a time when he was young, he was really rather thin, and for many years when he went unpublished and unrecognised. This book looks in depth at the people, events, books, paintings, plays, poems and circumstances that conspired to make the man as he is today.

Suiting form to subject, Rodge Glass has brought the inventive techniques of Gray's fiction to bear on the biographer's role. Mixing a chronological narrative of his subject's life (at the rate of one chapter per decade) with his own diaries of meeting, getting to know and working with the artist, writer and campaigner, narrative and diaries eventually dovetail in a riotous final chapter on the publication of Alasdair Gray's latest novel, Old Men in Love, in October 2007.

Tickets are available from the front desk at Blackwell.