Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1958) is a Scottish novelist and short story writer.

He states that he was born in 1958, though, according to the Glasgow police, his birth record is dated around 1951.

When he was four, his family moved to Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, where they stayed in local housing schemes.

His mother worked as a waitress.

His father was a dock worker in Leith until bad health forced him to stop, after which he became a carpet salesman; he died when Welsh was 25.

Welsh left Ainslie Park High School when he was 16 and then completed a City and Guilds course in electrical engineering.

He became an apprentice TV repairman until an electric shock persuaded him to move on to a series of other jobs.

He left Edinburgh for the London punk scene in 1978, where he played guitar and sang in The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13.

A series of arrests for petty crimes and finally a suspended sentence for trashing a North London community centre inspired Welsh to correct his ways.

He worked for Hackney Council in London and studied computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission.

Welsh returned to Edinburgh in the late 1980s, where he worked for the city council in the housing department.

He then studied for an MBA at Heriot-Watt University.

Welsh has published eleven novels and four collections of short stories.

Set in the mid-1980s, it uses a series of non-linear and loosely connected short-stories to tell the story of a group of characters tied together by decaying friendships, heroin addiction and stabs at escape from the oppressive boredom and brutality of their lives in the social housing schemes.

It was released to shock and outrage in some circles and great acclaim in others.

His 1993 novel Trainspotting was made into a film of the same name.

He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.

Irvine Welsh was born in Leith, the port area of the Scottish capital Edinburgh.

His first novel, Trainspotting, was published in 1993.

It was adapted as a play, and a film adaptation, directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge, was released in 1996.

Welsh appeared in the film in the minor role of drug dealer Mikey Forrester.

Next, Welsh released The Acid House, a collection of short stories from Rebel Inc., New Writing Scotland and other sources.

Many of the stories take place in and around the housing schemes from Trainspotting, and employ many of the same themes; a touch of fantasy is apparent in stories such as The Acid House, where the minds of a baby and a drug user swap bodies, or The Granton Star Cause, where God transforms a man into a fly as punishment for wasting his life.

Welsh adapted three of the stories for a later film of the same name, in which he also appeared.

Welsh's third book (and second novel), Marabou Stork Nightmares, alternates between a grim tale of thugs and schemes in sub-working class Scotland and a hallucinatory adventure tale set in South Africa.

Gradually, common themes emerge.

His next book, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (1996), became his most high-profile work since Trainspotting, released in the wave of publicity surrounding the film.

It consists of three unconnected novellas: the first, Lorraine Goes To Livingston, is a bawdy satire of classic British romance novels, the second, Fortune's Always Hiding, is a revenge story involving thalidomide and the third, The Undefeated, is a sly, subtle romance between a young woman dissatisfied with the confines of her suburban life and an aging clubgoer.

A corrupt police officer and his tapeworm served as the narrators for his third novel, Filth (1998).

The main character of Filth was a vicious sociopathic policeman.

Glue (2001) was a return to the locations, themes and episodic form of Trainspotting, telling the stories of four characters spanning several decades in their lives and the bonds that held them together.

Having revisited some of them in passing in Glue, Welsh brought most of the Trainspotting characters back for a sequel, Porno, in 2002.

In this book Welsh explores the impact of pornography on the individuals involved in producing it, as well as society as a whole, and the impact of ageing and maturity in individuals against their will.

The book is set just after the opening of the new Scottish Parliament.

Welsh, Ian Rankin, and Alexander McCall Smith each contributed a short story for the One City compilation published in 2005 in benefit of the One City Trust for social inclusion in Edinburgh.

In Crime, Ray Lennox (from Welsh's previous work, Filth) is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), deals with a young, alcoholic civil servant who finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on his nemesis, a nerdy co-worker.

In 2007, Welsh published If You Liked School You'll Love Work, his first collection of short stories in over a decade.

Welsh contributed a novella called Contamination to The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa.

The novel was adapted to a film with the same name in 2013.