Alasdair Gray is a 'self-employed verbal and pictorial artist'. Born in Glasgow, trained as a painter at the Glasgow School of Art, he worked as a part-time art teacher, muralist and theatrical scene painter before becoming a full-time painter and playwright. His books include the highly-acclaimed first novel Lanark; 1982 Janine; Fall of Kelvin Walker: A Fable of the Sixties; Something Leather; Poor Things (which won the Whitbread Novel Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize. He has also written for stage, radio and television, and between 1965 and 1976 had 17 TV and radio plays broadcast, as well as four further plays produced for the theatre, including Working Legs: A Play for Those Without Them. In 2001 he became, with Tom Leonard and James Kelman, joint Professor of the Creative Writing programme at Glasgow and Strathclyde University. His latest book is Old Men in Love.