Alan Cumming to record audiobook of cult classic Scottish novel

The Hollywood and Broadway star, who has recently been appointed as artistic director at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, said the book had changed his life and he “could not believe” he had been asked to do it.

He revealed the project while appearing as an on-stage guest at an event hosted by Nicola Sturgeon and the crime writer Val McDermid in Edinburgh.

Mr Cumming, who is known for his various stage and screen roles as well as for hosting the reality television show The Traitors, said he loved doing audiobooks.

"I'm about to do, later this year, a Scottish classic that just changed my life, and I can't believe they've asked me to do it, and I'm not allowed to say what it is," he told the event at Edinburgh’s Assembly Hall.

After being pushed by his fellow guests, Mr Cumming gave them a clue by mimicking painting a mural, and then confirmed the book was Lanark. "It's so exciting," he said. "That book changed my life."

Mr Gray, a writer and artist known for his novels, short stories, illustrations and murals, was hailed as a "cultural trailblazer" and “genius” when he died in 2019 at the age of 85.

Nick Barley, the former director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, praised his role "in creating the conditions for a literary renaissance that has, in so many different ways, changed most people's understanding about what it means to be Scottish today".

His first novel, Lanark, subtitled A Life in Four Books, was published in 1981 and had a massive impact on a generation of Scottish artists and writers. It has been described as Scotland's Ulysses.

The novel combines realism and surreal fantasy to tell two interlinked stories set in Glasgow and the hellish city of Unthank.

Its unusual structure is certain to throw up challenges for any audiobook recording. Potential obstacles include an epilogue - inserted before the end of the book - featuring an “index of plagiarisms” that runs alongside the main text as well as multiple footnotes.

Mr Cumming said the novel blew his mind when he first encountered it as a student.

"Just the idea of what you could be as an artist, as a Scottish artist,” he said. “The craziness, surreality of it. I was very young when it came out. I was a student in Glasgow. It just blew my mind.

"I'd been so used to being told what our particular box was we had to stay in, and then here comes Alasdair Gray and just blew that box open."

Ms Sturgeon said the news was “amazing”, and joked to the audience: “Don’t tell a soul.”

Lanark was adapted into a critically acclaimed stage play by David Greig in 2015.

Meanwhile, Mr Gray’s 1992 novel Poor Things was recently made into an Oscar winning film directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef.

Ms Sturgeon and Ms McDermid will headline a further show at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival next year, again focused on books and reading.