Bitter Fruit
Bitter Fruit is a searingly honest and brutally funny memoir set in 1980s UK, a decade when the news was rarely good. Told in her unique voice, Thomson’s personal story of a young woman coming to terms with the trauma of her past while negotiating the bleak realities of the present depicts her life as a working class student in a middle-class art school world. On graduating into a grim landscape of mass unemployment, clings onto hopes for the future while navigating her way through life on the dole, finding and losing religion, and a series of mind-numbing jobs. Illustrated with contemporary photographs and sketches by the author, Bitter Fruit as frank and darkly funny as its predecessor, Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares. Both memoirs are published by Outcast Press.
Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares
A frank and darkly funny memoir about being part of the first generation to grow up in the most ambitious and experimental of Scotland's new towns - Cumbernauld. Set mainly in the 1970s, a time when trousers were flared, sexism was the norm, and the beating of school children was industrialised. But with mass strike action, the three-day week, and the shift from the old imperial monetary system to decimalisation, it was also a time of great unrest and change. This is a classic coming of age story and while the time and place are specific, the themes of Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares are universal.
Live Literature
LG Thomson is available for readings, workshops and talks. She has extensive experience of running creative writing workshops with the emphasis on creative and is listed on the Scottish Book Trust Author Directory. If you are a school, library, community group or not-for-profit organisation based in Scotland and would like to commission LG for an event you can apply for partial funding via the Live Literature programme.
LG Thomson
Artist | Author
LG Thomson uses writing and art to explore the ways in which the past echoes around us and how life leaves its marks upon us. She is fascinated by the push-pull tension of the internal conflict and the struggle between dark and light. Her work is essentially about the absurdity, joy and pain of existence.
LG was born in Glasgow. Home was a single room tenement flat with a communal toilet until her family moved to Cumbernauld, a social experiment billed as The Town for Tomorrow. She left home at 17 to attend art school in Dundee. Four tumultuous years later she graduated into a grim landscape of mass unemployment. A heady mix of life on the dole, artist’s residencies and waitressing followed before she gained employment as an illustrator and graphic designer. She went on to specialise in poster campaigns for issues as varied as HIV and AIDS awareness, football hooliganism, and knife crime. When she began writing her first novel pressures of time meant that her own art fell by the wayside. After a hiatus lasting more than two decades art exploded back into her life.
She now lives in Ullapool, a small fishing village on the north west coast of Scotland lying on the same latitude as Lost Cove Alaska. She is the author of seven novels, including Boyle’s Law, a neo noir thriller set in the Highlands. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary publications including Wyldblood Magazine and the Urban Pigs Hunger anthology. Her latest books, Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares and Bitter Fruit are narrative memoirs set in 1970s and 1980s Scotland. ​​​
Author Talk with LG Thomson
LG Thomson answers the questions authors get asked by readers and shares some of her favourite reads.
