Liz Lochhead

Poet, playwright, translator, broadcaster and a close friend and creative collaborator of Alasdair’s over many decades.

What does Alasdair Gray mean to you?

Explain yourself?

I think of Alasdair very often and many of the things he said to me keep resonating freshly and creatively in new circumstances he is no longer alive to experience, though he was prescient about many of them. The 3 words I have picked are an attempt to hone in on 3 very different facets of both his intellect and his personality from my point of view.

Being limited to only 3 words certainly concentrates the mind on the extreme economy necessary - to the extent where one is confronted by the impossibility of the task and the inevitable inadequacy of the list one has chosen!

I choose…

Unique: Which seems like a banal platitude because each and every one of us is different, of course. But I'd say Alasdair was so singular a person, so unlike anyone else I have ever met that he deserves it more than anyone else I've ever known.

Generous: Because it refers not just to his intellect but to his personality and his extreme out-going kindness to all the human beings he ever came across. I - among many others - was the recipient of this extraordinary generosity. In my own case especially in one gift he gave me which actually made a huge difference to my first book of poems being published.

Lucid: Because of the great clarity of his expression of either ideas in words, or in his mastery of pure line in his visual art. This quality of distilled lucidity - at least when he had the time to sort all out the complexity of his thought before putting it out into the world - was so extraordinary and so specific.