About

Photo: Alan Dimmick, taken @ Cove Park, 2023

Rodge’s bio – in brief

Rodge Glass is the author of eight books published since 2005: No Fireworks (a novel, Faber & Faber), Hope for Newborns (a novel, Faber & Faber), Alasdair Gray: A Secretary’s Biography (Bloomsbury), Dougie’s War (a graphic novel, with Dave Turbitt, Freight Books), Bring Me the Head of Ryan Giggs (a novel, Serpent’s Tail), Stories for the EasyJet Generation (short story collection, Freight Books), Michel Faber: The Writer & his Work (Liverpool University Press) and the new nonfiction book Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir (Taproot Press, September 2024). He is also the author of two audio stories for children: ‘A Little Light’ (2023) and ‘The Magic of Stories’ (2024), both available on BBC Sounds as part of the ‘Time for a Story’ series. He is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s Take Four Books, as well as BBC Scotland’s Sunday Morning programme as a commentator, and is much in demand at book festivals locally, nationally and internationally as both an author and a host. Rodge is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde.

Rodge’s work has been nominated for ten national and international awards, including the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Authors’ Club Awards. His biography of Alasdair Gray won a Somerset Maugham Award for Nonfiction and his essay ‘On the Covenant’ won the 2023 Anne Brown Essay Prize, hosted by the Wigtown Book Festival. In September 2025, an expanded paperback of his book on Michel Faber was published. In March 2026, Joshua in the Sky: A Blood Memoir will be published in paperback. His next book, soon to be announced, will be published in August 2026.

More detail:

Over the years Rodge’s work has been nominated for numerous awards, both national and international, including the Authors’ Club Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Frank O’Connor Award and the Saltire Award, and he won a Somerset Maugham Award for Non-Fiction in 2009. Rodge has also written for The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Herald, The Scotsman and others. His various fictions have been translated into Albanian, Danish, German, Hebrew, Spanish and Slovenian, and he has appeared at international literary festivals around the world, including New York, Toronto and Rome. His novel Voglio la Testa di Ryan Giggs was published in Italian (66thand2nd, Roma) in 2014, and the short story collection Price za Izidzet generaciju was published in Serbian (Rasic Literary Workshop, Belgrade) in 2016.  Recent critical work  includes two chapters in Michel Faber: Critical Essays (Glyphi, 2020, image below) and a chapter in Scottish Writing After Devolution: Edges of the New (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Recent nonfiction writing includes ‘On Speculation’ in New Writing Scotland 40: No One Remembers the Birdman (ASL, 2022), ‘On Waves’, in Epoch Journal, Issue 4 (2021) ‘On Biography’, published in Gutter magazine in August 2023, and ‘Return to ‘The Gorbals’ in New Writing Scotland 43: A Chaos of Light (2025).

Rodge is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, where he was the Convener of the MLitt in Creative Writing from 2020 to 2025, before handing over to Dr. Jessica Widner. In 2021, he was Convener of the 1st International Alasdair Gray Online Symposium, and in 2022 he was Convener of the 2nd International Alasdair Gray Conference: Across Space & Form, hosted at the University of Strathclyde and in partner venues right across the city of Glasgow. 

Rodge is also an experienced editor of over twenty novels and short story collections, inclluding the Saltire Award-winning Goblin by Ever Dundas, Treats by Lara Williams, and The Book of the Gaels by the renowned Scottish writer and musician James Yorkston (Oldcastle Books, 2022).