Poor Things

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Dr Archibald McCandless (1862–1911) was born in Whauphill, Galloway, the illegitimate son of a prosperous tenant farmer. He studied medicine at Glasgow University, worked briefly as a house surgeon and public health officer, then devoted himself to literature and the education of his sons. His once famous epic, The Testament of Sawney Bean, has long been unfairly neglected, and his wife suppressed the first edition of his greatest work, the autobiographical Poor Things. Recently rediscovered by the Glasgow local historian, Mike Donnelly, this weird narrative is as gripping as Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and in 1992 received both the Whitbread Award and the Guardian Prize.

Alasdair Gray, the editor, was born in Riddrie, Glasgow, 1934, the son of a cardboard-box manufacturer and part-time hill guide. He obtained a Scottish Education Department Diploma in Design and Mural Painting and is now a fat, balding, asthmatic, married pedestrian who lives by writing and designing things.