The Hug Painting

LG Thomson was born in Glasgow and grew up in Cumbernauld, the most ambitious and experimental of Scotland’s post-war New Towns. Cumbernauld is famous as the setting of the Bill Forsythe film, Gregory's Girl, and is infamous for its brutalist architecture. After graduating from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in 1985, LG worked as an illustrator and graphic designer specialising in poster campaigns for issues as varied as HIV and AIDS awareness, football hooliganism, and knife crime. Her writing career began when she won a national creative writing competition and was short-listed for the Dundee Book Prize. She now lives in Ullapool, on the Northwest coast of the Scottish Highlands, where she writes, paints, and runs creative writing workshops. She has published seven novels including noir thrillers Boyle's Law and Boiling Point and her writing has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary publications, including All Mod Icon, Wyldblood Magazine, Epoch Press, and Art North. Her latest book, Modernist Dreams Brutalist Nightmares, is a narrative memoir about being part of the first generation to grow up in Cumbernauld. Published by Outcast Press 2022. LG is interested in exploring the ways in which life leaves its marks upon us, how the past echoes around us, and the ways in which we carry it within us. She is excited by figures at the edges, crossing boundaries, disappearing into the unknown. The push-pull tension of the struggle from dark to light. The exploration of the internal conflict. The absurdity, joy and pain of existence.