Biography :: Irvine Welsh Official Website Irvine Welsh :: Home :: Biography Biography Irvine Welsh was born in the great city of Edinburgh, Scotland. He can't quite recall if it was Simpson's or Elsie Inglis maternity pavilions. In fact he remembers little of the birth, though his mother assured him later that it was fairly routine. This selective memory at key points in his life would continue. What he seems quite certain of is that his family moved from their tenement home in Leith, to the prefabs in West Pilton, and then onto Muirhouse's maisonette flats. Welsh left Ainslie Park Secondary School when he was sixteen and had various jobs, but didn't really like work any more than he did school. However, he was very fortunate to meet some exceptionally decent people at both, most of whom tolerated him. London called in the late seventies and he tried to catch up on some of education he'd missed on while daydreaming about more interesting things, as enjoyed the London punk scene. The jobs got better and he got on the property ladder and made some money, but in the good Scots tradition, he managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Cleaning up his act, and, in keeping with another great tradition, 'finding a nice lassie and settling doon', Welsh eventually returned to Edinburgh where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He went on to study for an MBA at Heriot Watt University. Welsh regards himself as very fortunate to be back in his home town when Kevin Williamson, Duncan McLean, Barry Graham, Alan Warner, Paul Reekie and Rodney Relax were all doing their thing. Energised by the rave scene, he started to write and his paths crossed with the above. Digging out some old diaries, Welsh did a draft of what would become Trainspotting. Welsh published parts this from 1991 onwards in DOG, the West Coast Magazine, and New Writing Scotland. Duncan McLean published parts of the novel in two Clocktower pamphlets, A Parcel of Rogues and Past Tense: Four Stories from a Novel. Meanwhile Kevin Williamson, a member of Duncan McLean’s Muirhouse writers’ group, published sections of Trainspotting in the literary magazine Rebel Inc.

Duncan McLean recommended Welsh to Robin Robertson, then editorial director of Secker & Warburg, who decided to publish Trainspotting, despite believing that it was unlikely to sell. When Trainspotting was published in 1993 Irvine Welsh shot to fame. According to Lord Gowrie, the chairman of the panel, the novel was rejected for the Booker Prize shortlist after offending the sensibilities of two female judges. Despite this unease from the critical establishment, Welsh’s novel received as many good reviews as ones swathed in disgust and outrage - establishing a tradition that continues to this day. Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of the novel was premiered at the Glasgow Mayfest in April 1994 and went on to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival and in London before touring the UK. In August 1995, Irvine Welsh gave up his day job. Since Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Trainspotting was released in February 1996 Irvine Welsh has remained a controversial figure, whose novels, stage and screen plays, novellas and short stories have proved difficult for literary critics to assimilate, a difficulty made only more noticeable by Welsh’s continued commercial success.

More books have followed, Ecstasy becoming the first paperback original to go straight in at No1 on the Sunday Times best-sellers list, a feat emulated by Filth, which became Welsh's highest selling book after Trainspotting. His first novel has now sold almost 1 million copies in the UK alone and is a worldwide phenomenon. Books such as Glue, Porno and recent The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs have seen him increase his profile in America and Canada. He has recently branched into film and is a partner in two film production companies. He joined Four Ways films, which was founded by Antonia Bird, Robert Carlyle and Mark Cousins, and has recently set up Jawbone films with his screenwriting partner Dean Cavanagh, and Phil John and Jon Lewis Owen. In 2005 Welsh married for the second time. He promises that he's never doing it again. He lives mainly in Dublin but retreats to Miami Beach for a large part of the winter. He visits his home city of Edinburgh regularly, usually to visit friends, family and Hibernian FC at Easter Road.

As Welsh says: 'the jobs are a wee bit too boring to recount and the books and other stuff you can get from other parts of the site.' Interviews BBC Two - Writing Scotland - Irvine Welsh Writing Scotland 1961 - Biography Irvine Welsh was born in Leith in 1961. He moved with his family to Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, at the age of four. Welsh left Ainslee Park Secondary School when he was sixteen and went on to complete a City Guild course in electrical engineering. Thereafter, Welsh worked as an apprentice TV repairman until an electric shock persuaded him to abandon this work in favour of a series of other jobs, before leaving Edinburgh for the London punk scene in 1978. There, Welsh played guitar and sang in The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13. Later, he worked for Hackney Council in London and studied computing with the help of a grant from the Manpower Services Commission. After working in the London property boom of the 1980s, Welsh returned to Edinburgh where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He went on to study for an MBA at Heriot Watt University, writing his thesis on creating equal opportunities for women.

Welsh published stories and parts of what would later become Trainspotting from 1991 onwards in DOG, the West Coast Magazine, and New Writing Scotland. Duncan McLean published parts of the novel in two Clocktower pamphlets, A Parcel of Rogues and Past Tense: Four Stories from a Novel. Meanwhile Kevin Williamson, a member of Duncan McLean’s Muirhouse writers’ group, published sections of Trainspotting in the literary magazine Rebel Inc. Duncan McLean recommended Welsh to Robin Robertson, then editorial director of Secker & Warburg, who decided to publish Trainspotting, despite believing that it was unlikely to sell. When Trainspotting was published in 1993 Irvine Welsh shot to fame. The novel was apparently rejected for the Booker Prize shortlist after offending the ‘feminist sensibilities’ of two of the judges (Purlock, 1996). Despite this unease from the critical establishment, Welsh’s novel received good reviews. Harry Gibson’s stage adaptation of the novel was premiered at the Glasgow Mayfest in April 1994 and went on to be staged at the Edinburgh Festival and in London before touring the UK.

In August 1995, Irvine Welsh gave up his day job. Since Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Trainspotting was released in February 1996 Irvine Welsh has remained a controversial figure, whose novels, stage and screen plays, novellas and short stories have proved difficult for literary critics to assimilate, a difficulty made only more noticeable by Welsh’s continued commercial success. ﻿(Last updated in September 2004) Works Irvine Welsh’s first novel, Trainspotting (1993), is set mostly in Leith and Edinburgh in the 1980s and consists of a series of loosely connected episodes which follow Welsh’s characters as they tell their stories of sex, drugs and dance music. The novel’s energy comes in part from the degree to which Welsh gives such distinctive voices to each of his characters, expecting his readers to tune in and recognise them with the first few words they speak. Trainspotting gained notoriety for its depiction of Edinburgh heroin culture; the novel is set at a time when Edinburgh was thought to be the ‘HIV capital of Europe’.

While heroin is undoubtedly crucial to many of the narratives in Welsh’s first novel, Trainspotting draws its readers’ attention to aspects of Scottish and British culture which are perhaps even more uncomfortable. Trainspotting talks about poverty, sectarianism, racism and attitudes towards disability, above all insisting that if there is no such thing as society, there is certainly no such thing as a classless society. Welsh’s characters are often highly sceptical about the ability of therapists, activists or politicians to change society for the better. For Mark Renton, the state’s attempt to bring him off heroin is a symptom of society’s inability to deal with someone who has consciously chosen to reject its values; ‘ah choose no tae choose life. If the cunts cannae handle that, it’s thair fuckin problem’ (Trainspotting, 188). Renton insists on his individual right to opt out of society, to take his life in his own hands, and refuses to allow society the option to view his rejection as a curiosity of medical science. This individualism also marks a rejection of socialist representations of the Scottish working class, which insisted upon class solidarity and the potential of collective action.

Welsh followed Trainspotting with a novella and collection of short stories called The Acid House (1994). One aspect of the use of drugs in Welsh’s fiction is that it has allowed him to integrate elements of fantasy into his portrayals of urban life. So, in the title story, ‘The Acid House’, Welsh has Hibs casual Coco Bryce exchange minds with a young baby, and then follows the baby and Coco as their mother and girlfriend try to make them into the men they want them to be. Elsewhere, in ‘The Granton Star Cause’ Boab meets God in the pub and is then turned into a bluebottle. Whereas Trainspotting is told in a cacophonous surround sound, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995) is a monologue. Roy Strang is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. He uses fantasy to avoid remembering the real life that has brought him here, from his childhood in Muirhouse, through his family’s attempt to make a new life for themselves in apartheid South Africa and Roy’s subsequent return to Scotland and time as a football casual.

The comparison Roy makes between the poor of Edinburgh and black South Africans under apartheid, along with the novel’s representation of rape, has made Marabou Stork Nightmares the most controversial of Welsh’s books to date. For Glue (2001), Irvine Welsh returned to the polyphonic style he employed in Trainspotting. Glue is Welsh’s longest book to date and also his most ambitious in scope. For the first time in an Irvine Welsh novel he takes us through three decades of his characters’ lives, from the 1970s to the early years of the new millennium. This allows Welsh to explore his four principal characters, Terry Lawson, Carl Ewart, Billy Birrell and Andrew Galloway, as they develop and change over time, charting their reactions to the changing world around them. The novel begins with its four characters’ parents in a Scotland so markedly different from the Scotland of Welsh’s earlier novels. It then moves to their children as they grow up in 1970s Edinburgh, beginning with Terry Lawson’s first day at school. The novel varies between a third person narrative and the distinctive individual voices of its characters.

The early section of Glue takes the traditional ‘young man growing up’ narrative and transforms it, replacing the individual focus of that form with an examination of how different people develop differently under similar circumstances. Welsh also takes away the soft-focus lens, refusing to censor his characters or sanitise their experiences. As Glue progresses, and its characters move from childhood to youth to middle age, it explores, in a more sustained way than elsewhere in Welsh’s work, the solidarity rejected at the end of Trainspotting. Glue is about friendship as much as it is about anger and inequality. Porno, the sequel to Trainspotting, was published in 2002. The events of the novel can be dated quite precisely, occurring after the opening of the new Scottish Parliament, but before Alex McLeish left Welsh’s beloved Hibernian football club to manage Rangers. In Porno, Welsh brings the Trainspotting characters back together, still suffering from the collective hangover caused by Mark Renton’s getaway to Amsterdam at the end of the earlier novel.

It is a common feature of Welsh’s fiction that characters from one book have cameo roles in another, creating a sense that each of Welsh’s stories takes place within a wider world in which there is always something going on offstage. (Lat updated in September 2004)﻿ Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh Scotland ( 1958 - ) Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh in 1958. He lived in London after leaving school, but returned to his native city where he worked in the Council's housing department. He gained a degree in computer science and studied for an MBA at Heriot Watt University. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993), a blackly comic portrait of a group of young heroin users living in Edinburgh in the 1980s, was adapted as a film directed by Danny Boyle, starring Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, in 1996. The Acid House, a collection of short stories, was published in 1994 and was followed by Welsh's second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), a harrowing stream-of-consciousness narrated by football hooligan Roy Strang.

Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, a collection of three novellas, was published in 1996, and a third novel, Filth, a vivid account of the violent adventures of a bigoted, racist and corrupt Scottish policeman, was published in 1998. Glue (2001), is the story of four boys growing up in an Edinburgh housing estate. Porno, a sequel to Trainspotting, was published in 2002. Welsh is also the author of the plays, Headstate (1994) and You'll Have Had Your Hole (1998). 4 Play, an omnibus edition of four stage adaptations of Welsh's fiction by Harry Gibson and Keith Wyatt, was published in 2001. His screenplay of The Acid House was directed for Channel 4 Films by Paul McGuigan (1998). His journalism includes a column for Loaded magazine and occasional articles for The Guardian. He is also a DJ and has recorded a single with rock group Primal Scream. In February 2003 Irvine Welsh began writing a Monday column for the Daily Telegraph.

Irvine Welsh - Literature Literature Biography Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh in 1958. He lived in London after leaving school, but returned to his native city where he worked in the Council's housing department. He gained a degree in computer science and studied for an MBA at Heriot Watt University. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993), a blackly comic portrait of a group of young heroin users living in Edinburgh in the 1980s, was adapted as a film directed by Danny Boyle, starring Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, in 1996. The Acid House, a collection of short stories, was published in 1994 and was followed by Welsh's second novel, Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), a harrowing stream-of-consciousness narrated by football hooligan Roy Strang. Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance, a collection of three novellas, was published in 1996, and a third novel, Filth, a vivid account of the violent adventures of a bigoted, racist and corrupt Scottish policeman, was published in 1998.

Glue (2001), is the story of four boys growing up in an Edinburgh housing estate. Porno, a sequel to Trainspotting, was published in 2002.Welsh is also the author of the plays, Headstate (1994) ; You'll Have Had Your Hole (1998); and Babylon Heights (2006), written with Dean Cavanagh. He has also written the screenplays for three original films and four short films. The books Ecstasy, Glue, Filth, Trainspotting and Marabou Stork Nights, have all been adapted for the stage and The Acid House and Ecstasy have been made into films.His journalism includes a column for Loaded magazine and occasional articles for The Guardian. He is also a DJ and has recorded a single with rock group Primal Scream. In February 2003 he began writing a Monday column for the Daily Telegraph.Later books include The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006); and If You Liked School You'll Love Work (2007).

His novel, Crime, was published in 2008 and his latest collection of stories is Reheated Cabbage (2009). He has recently branched into film, and is a partner in two film production companies. The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins (2014) is described by the Independent as ‘[eviscerating] Western society’s great…obsessions with food, health, sex and emotional perfection’. Set in Miami, it examines the effects of fame on a woman lauded as a ‘hero’ after her role in disarming a gunman. He lives in Chicago. A Decent Ride appeared in 2015 and was followed by The Blade Artist (2016). In late 2015, Welsh went with the British Council to FIL, Guadalajara International Book Fair, Mexico, and also to Peru. Awards Critical perspective Two common complaints of literary reviewers when considering the work of Welsh are that his books are read by people who don’t normally read and that their author has a negative view of literature (he prefers the title ‘cultural activist’ to ‘writer’). If either of these claims is true, then they perhaps deserve more credit than lofty condemnation.

If Welsh really is managing to engage a culturally illiterate audience that has traditionally remained beyond the influence of the bourgeois novel then this is a form of ‘cultural activism’ most other ‘writers’ of his generation seem to have turned their backs on.Although Trainspotting (1993) was longlisted for the Booker prize, Welsh’s writing belongs more accurately to the realm of the ‘popular’. By ‘popular’ I am not necessarily thinking of sales figures, but of the grotesque, carnivalesque imagery for which his work has become notorious. The emphasis of his novels, short stories and screenplays is on what Carl Ewart, a character in Glue (2001) describes as 'tales of excreta and ejecta – shite, pish and puke'.

It is no surprise that some of the central images of the film adaptation of Trainspotting involve unforgettably graphic acts of bodily expulsion, from the soiled sheets of Spud, to Renton’s unfortunate expulsion of his own drugs down a filthy pub toilet.Welsh’s books are equally well-known for their gatherings of junkies and drug dealers, prostitutes and pimps, psychos and scam artists, a cast made famous within his best selling debut novel, Trainspotting. The book is set in Edinburgh - not the tourist Edinburgh of Princes Street and the Royal Mile (what Welsh refers to derisively as 'shortbread disneyland') - but the geographical and metaphorical outskirts of the capital: the deprived and depressed underside of Leith. So why ‘trainspotting’? Near the end of the text, Begbie and Renton take a ‘pish’ in Leith’s defunct Central Station.

It is one of the rare, oblique references to ‘trainspotting’ in a novel whose title is said to revolve around the joke (Welsh likes his ‘in’ jokes) that Leith has not had a rail link for decades.If ‘trainspotting’ on one level appears to be an allusion to the social division between Leith and commercial Edinburgh (Welsh is a regular critic of the Edinburgh Festival on these grounds), then his novels are free from a nostalgic or sentimental vision of working-class Scotland. His is a post-Thatcher landscape in which traditional community relations have broken down. There is a lack of male solidarity – key to earlier post-war working-class fiction - to be found in Welsh’s writing. Begbie is as big a danger to his ‘pals’ as he is to the Edinburgh toffs he stumbles into in the city bars.In 1994, Welsh's short story collection, The Acid House, was published. The language of these tales, written in an unrelenting and aggressively masculine Scots dialect, has since become a trademark of Welsh’s fiction.

Considered by some as the main strength of his prose (Welsh, some claim, has an ‘ear’ for the urban underclass of Leith), by others as strained and inauthentic, what is clear is that the repetition and excess associated with its ‘bad language’ serves more than a ‘realistic’ purpose. It is through the inarticulate outbursts of his characters that their powerlessness is most eloquently and symbolically expressed. More recent short story collections include If You Liked School, You'll Love Work (2007) and Reheated Cabbage (2009). The former is an eclectic collection, stitched together by lurid sex acts, the latter, a recollection of (mostly) older stories and formerly pulished pieces, including, for diehard Trainspotting fans, a festive encounter with Begbie. Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Welsh’s second novel, followed quickly (some say too quickly) on the heels of the first. A rambling narrative (but then these are nightmares), it is structured around the memories of a football hooligan who is unconscious in hospital.

Marabou was followed soon after by Ecstasy (1996), a collection of three novellas and critically the least successful of his books. Welsh had to wait until 1998 and the publication of Filth (1998) before receiving warmer reviews. The filth of Filth refers principally to Detective Sergeant Bruce Robertson. However, the title is not just a nod to the content of the book but to its form, its textuality. Filth is both the subject of the book and a reference to the book itself. The title demands we read it literally. If filth is a metaphorical reference to the police (Bruce Robertson works for Lothian and Borders force), then Robertson is ‘filth’ in a more literal sense: a serial rapist, thief, and drug abuser. If trains are pretty much absent from Trainspotting then glue is about the only substance not taken by the characters of Glue (2001), one of Welsh’s most adventurous novels to date.

Like Marabou Stork Nightmares, Glue centres on the lives of a group of Edinburgh ‘schemies’ and charts the coming of age of four young men over four decades and over 400 pages.Porno (2002) is a return to the fictional world of Trainspotting that made him famous a decade earlier, and has been hailed by many critics as a return to form. The novel progresses plausibly from where Trainspotting left off. Renton is now living in Amsterdam. Begbie is in jail. Sick Boy works in a strip joint. Meanwhile Spud, in the most unlikely career move of all has decided to write a book. When the group come back together, it is not long before another money making scam begins to emerge. The title provides you with all the clues you need. Welsh’s mid-decade work was dominated by a couple of collaborative efforts including Babylon Heights (with Dean Cavanagh, 2006), and One City (with Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith, 2006). Babylon Heights is a bizarre but extremely funny play.

Spinning off from The Wizard of Oz, it imagines four munchkins in a Californian Hotel room getting high on drugs and alcohol. One City is a collection of three stories, one of them by Welsh, written for the One City charity, which seeks to combat social exclusion in the city. The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006) unfolds during the US elections of 2004, and in tandem with the unfolding of Edinburgh-based Health Officer, Danny Skinner’s unhealthy obsession with tv programme ‘The Secrets of Masterchef’. It is an obsession that takes Danny to America in a narrative exploring the conjunctions between food, pornography and celebrity. Described in the Financial Times as ‘Welsh at his best’, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs was hailed by various critics as a return to form. In his tenth and most recent novel, Crime (2008), Welsh opts for one of his trademark titles: a single word, a blunt literalism. However, beneath the in your face cover is a surprisingly restrained handling of a risqué (even for Welsh) subject: paedophile rings.

Ray Lennox, formerly of Filth, is a policeman who ends up in America on the trail of a serial child abuser. It is a book that is currently dividing the critics, as The New York Times summarised: ‘Crime is an ambitious, compassionate and serious book; many of Welsh’s fans, however, will miss the trash talk, the perverse comedy and, yes, even the spastics.’ 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years - The Scotsman Heroes 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years Robert Carlyle in Trainspotting. In many ways the book is more shocking, more disturbing and much funnier. Picture: Contributed STUART KELLY 19:30 Wednesday 30 October 2013 00:35 Thursday 31 October 2013 Scotsman literary critic Stuart Kelly’s verdict on the best 50 Scottish books of the last five decades. John Aberdein, Amande’s Bed, 2006 Around Peem, a wee boy in 1950s Aberdeen, orbits a continental cast of communists, refugees, drop-outs and outcasts.

Aberdein’s polyphonic novel has set piece scenes that are outrageously good – a translation of Rabelais in particular – but the whole is informed by a glinting political consciousness and a linguistic deftness encompassing Doric, Scots and English as a second tongue. Kate Atkinson, Life After Life, 2013 The title does not just refer to the repeated lives of the heroine Ursula Todd (Tod is German for death, and Ursula dies just a few pages in... Only to live again and die again). It is also about afterlives and consequences. Ursula, whose lives cover the 20th century, is an incarnation of Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, and strives to find the life where, if she had to live exactly again, she could joyfully accept doing so. Iain Banks, The Bridge, 1986 Banks always referred to The Bridge as “the intellectual of the family” and it is a dazzling piece of work.

Three narratives – a barbarian in a fantastical realm of myth, a man living in a bridge the size of a city with a totalitarian government and Alex, who has benefited from and is cursed by Thatcher’s affluence – intersect and intercut with each other. What is dream and what is reality? Iain M Banks, Excession, 1996 The Culture’s artificial intelligence minds confront a black perfect sphere they call the Excession, which seems to be older than the universe itself. If that wasn’t enough of a conundrum, they have to deal with a race so sadistic they are called The Affront. With typical wit and imagination, Banks delivers a science fiction story which asks how far a liberal society will go to defend its liberalism. William Boyd, The New Confessions, 1989 This maximalist fiction follows John James Todd from his birth in Edinburgh, to the trenches of World War One, Berlin, Hollywood and eventual exile in the Mediterranean, and features an attempt to make a film of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. The novel deals with patriotism and personal integrity, political and domestic betrayals, and how the camera reveals and lies.

Christopher Brookmyre, One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, 1999 Christopher Brookmyre’s plot-driven novels gnash at issues of corruption and social justice with leftist satirical bite. In the Die Hard-inspired One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, Brookmyre invites a host of intriguing characters to a school reunion on an oil rig, repurposed as a holiday resort and a prime target for a bunch of hapless mercenary terrorists. What’s the worst that could happen? George Mackay Brown, Magnus, 1973 Mackay Brown, an Orcadian, saw time as sea-like, changeless and in constant change, a succession of waves and ripples, and nowhere is this better expressed than in Magnus, where medieval martyrdom and murder expands out from its stark specific details into universal significance. The lyricism of the language is equalled by the precise structure, as perfect and absurd as a gothic arch. John Burnside, Glister, 2008 Nobody creates modern myths like John Burnside. Near abandoned factories, teenagers hunt evasive mutants; sometimes these children disappear. To peer too closely at what is happening might lead the local policeman to “either hell or salvation”.

Burnside is Scotland’s David Lynch, fusing the horrific and the banal, smudging the line between the inexplicable and the everyday. Andrew Crumey, Pfitz, 1997 Scotland’s most European novelist creates an intricate and ingenious puzzle-box in Pfitz, where an insane but ingenuous Prince devotes his entire country and its wealth to the creation of Rreinnstadt, a city which exists only on paper. Towards the city meander Pfitz and his master, discussing the nature of reality en route. Crumey is Scotland’s equivalent of Borges and Calvino and Perec. Anne Donovan, Buddha Da, 2003 The charm of Anne Donovan’s novel is not just in its conceit: Jimmy, a painter and decorator from the West, suddenly decides that life is suffering, desire is the cause of suffering and Buddha is the way. It’s not his first enthusiasm, but it is the one that causes most pain to his wife and child. But in delightful Scots, Donovan catches a crisis, a resolution, an affair and a transformation.

Michel Faber, Under The Skin, 2000 The monsters in the Highlands are not in Loch Ness, but picking up hitchhikers on the A9. In Michel Faber’s eerie first novel, bodies are morphed and consumed, damaged and deranged as the alien protagonist harvests the itinerant and the wandering. Crisp and stealthy prose clinically unravels the paradox of a monster becoming human both physiologically and psychologically. Jenni Fagan, The Panopticon, 2011 Jenni Fagan was listed as one of the Granta Best of Young British Novelists for her debut. The Panopticon features Anais Hendricks – the fact that both names are brands is both tragic and joyous – a girl in care who couldn’t care less. Is she an experiment for paranormal powers? Is she a danger to herself or to others? This powerful novel undercuts assumptions and tugs heart-strings. George Friel, Mr Alfred MA, 1972 Mr Alfred is a sensitive elderly schoolteacher who spirals into madness through a combination of drink, the rejection of his poetry and an unwise infatuation with a pupil.

Friel’s tragic novel unfolds against an apocalyptic backdrop of feral gangs and fearful graffiti, and achieves a Joycean linguistic inventiveness as Alfred’s values, beliefs and even words begin to fall apart. Janice Galloway, The Trick Is To Keep Breathing, 1989 The ironically named Joy Stone is a schoolteacher attempting to fend off depression in Galloway’s startling debut novel. She is assailed by grief, bolstered and bruised by alcohol. Using typographical innovations, parodies of women’s magazines and finely-grained observation, the novel presents a searing portrait of a mind in crisis and offers the possibility of hope in its darkest moments. Alasdair Gray, Lanark, 1981 Lanark begins with Book III – already the reader knows they are in the hands of an author willing to subvert and stretch the novel in many ways. The story of Duncan Thaw, a disaffected art student, is wrapped inside the story of Lanark, a man afflicted with dragonhide disease in an eerie, twilit city. Reality and fantasy clash, Glasgow is reborn and the author makes an unexpected appearance.

Archie Hind, The Dear Green Place, 1966 Glasgow, the dear green place of the title, is not perhaps the most fertile of environments, at least as far as the novel’s central character is concerned. Mat Craig is a decent working class young man with literary ambitions. These are, however, variously stifled and suppressed: he works as a slaughterman since writing won’t pay the bills. This is an anxious, plaintive study of creativity. Stuart Hood, A Den Of Foxes, 1991 A former controller of BBC television, Hood was also a novelist of distinction, and this avant garde investigation into war, games and war games is a work of supreme ingenuity. Peter Sinclair meditates on his time behind Italian lines in WW2 when he starts playing war games; in a science fiction story he writes, the narrator plays games written by a Peter Sinclair about Italian POWs. A knotty fugue of a book, it defies classification. Robin Jenkins, Fergus Lamont, 1979 Fergus Lamont is a compelling story of personal reinvention that cuts to the quick of the Scottish psyche, posing questions about how we become what we are.

Born poor, Fergus adopts a kilt and an aristocratic persona. He has the capacity for both callous disregard and surprising tenderness, and Jenkins offers the possibility of redemption through love even for such a monster of ego as Fergus. Jackie Kay, Trumpet, 1998 Jackie Kay’s novel is centred on jazz player Joss Moody. His trumpeting has made him famous, but after his death a fact emerges that went very much untrumpeted in his life: he was a woman. Kay deals sensitively with race and gender, with adoption and inheritance, to create a vivid portrayal of love which transcends boundaries and art which unites the most disparate of individuals. James Kelman, Kieron Smith, Boy, 2008 Scotland’s only Man Booker Prize winner is sometimes seen as a grim and sweary chronicler of the déclassé, yet in Kieron Smith, Boy he shows how subtle and how subversive he is as a novelist. Kieron, whose language grows up as he grows up, is the keyhole through which we see a changing world. Kelman balances the naive and the innocent, idealism and cynicism, to dramatic effect.

James Kennaway, The Mind Benders, 1963 This is an overlooked gem: Major “Ramrod” Hall is assigned to observe Sharpey, a scientist working on the effects of sensory deprivation. Sharpey, apparently, commits suicide and the action turns to his erstwhile assistant, Longman, who has a worrying tendency to self-experimentation. This patient, psychologically astute and chilling novel was also made into a film, with Kennaway’s script. A L Kennedy, Day, 2007 Winner of the Costa Prize, A L Kennedy’s Day is a novel about war and the trauma of war. A rear gunner finds himself acting in a re-enactment of the prisoner of war camp he was actually imprisoned in; his memories of his brothers-in-arms resurface as he struggles to balance the sense of belonging the war gave him with everything it took from him. Day is a plangent, humane story. Jessie Kesson, Another Time, Another Place, 1983 Jessie Kesson was an immaculate observer of things, and in Another Time, Another Place she fixes on a clash of cultures between Italian prisoners of war and the crofting community where they are billeted.

The result is a poignant and strange story, where the so-called enemy has dreams that cut across the limitations of place and time and transforms a “wifie” to a woman “con amore”. Frank Kuppner, A Very Quiet Street, 1992 Frank Kuppner is unclassifiable. Is this a novel? A memoir? A psychogeography? A true-crime investigation? Whatever it is, it is unforgettable; a book where Kuppner ruminates on the famous Oscar Slater murder case while haunted by more personal grief. It shows a wide-eyed and stark bemusement about the brute fact of death, the tenacity of memory and the surrealism of the real. Joan Lingard, The Prevailing Wind, 1964 Better known for her novels for young adults, Lingard is nevertheless an accomplished and inventive writer for adults as well, as this deft and insightful examination of the life of a single mother in Edinburgh amply shows. Lingard portrays Edinburgh at its most intractable and hard-faced, a city of propriety and property, of “husbands who were more Calvinist that Calvin himself”.

Allan Massie, A Question of Loyalties, 1989 What happens when you lose a war? Allan Massie’s profoundly moving and clever novel deals with Vichy France and the moral dilemmas raised by both collaboration and resistance. Using unreliable narrators and fake artefacts, Massie’s tale of a man of dual nationalities raised in South Africa trying to establish the truth about his father “vigorously pushed back the narrowing boundaries of fiction”. Bernard MacLaverty, Grace Notes, 1997 Catherine McKenna, the composer in MacLaverty’s Man Booker shortlisted novel is stranded in silence between postpartum depression after the birth of her daughter and the death of her abusive, drunk father. This Portrait of the Artist as a Grieving Woman examines how art can be transcendent and cathartic, and in using the Lambeg drums in her work MacLaverty suggests how the Troubles might be aesthetically transformed. Ken MacLeod, Newton’s Wake, 2004 Imagine a future where faster than light travel is not controlled by liberal boffins but by Glasgow neds.

Humanity has slowly fled Earth and mapped its divisions on the cosmos, leaving behind a Glasgow family that discover a skein of wormholes. MacLeod is a formidable imagineer, whose politically savvy sci-fi constantly stretches our assumptions about the future, with wit and sting. Val McDermid, A Place of Execution, 1999 A girl disappears from an isolated village in Derbyshire, in 1963, a region already living with the fear of missing children. Structured in two parts, this novel first presents a “true-crime” account of the investigation and trial”, and then, as DI George Bennett demands that the account we have read isn’t published, what we know is turned upside down. McDermid explores the difference between justice being done and the truth being laid bare. This is a taut, carefully-paced challenge to the police procedural, concerned with the malleability of our perception of truth and how we choose to deal with malevolence. William McIlvanney, Docherty, 1975 Forget the “Father of Tartan Noir” tag that has been put on McIlvanney’s work.

Docherty, his third novel, is a serious, considered and achingly sympathetic engagement with the people whose only trace in the historical record is birth and death notices. He conjures a mining community as it vanishes with its values. He commemorates a white-knuckled decency and a red-faced self-mastery. Candia McWilliam, A Case Of Knives, 1987 Arch, flinty and gimlet-eyed, Candia McWilliam’s first novel situates itself in the Scottish tradition of doubles and fissures, justified sinners and unjustified saints. In this book, a gay heart surgeon grooms a woman to become the wife of the man he loves. McWilliam is exact and sly, surreptitious and precise, feline in circling actors, and with a ear perfectly attuned to the word “split”. James Meek, The People’s Act Of Love, 2005 Meek is a master of the “moral thriller”, novels which combine pacy plotting with thorny questions.

In The People’s Act Of Love, set in Siberia after the Russian Revolution he pits utopian fanatics against pragmatic hypocrites in wondering about who should forge the future and how much one can sacrifice before it turns into masochism. Is love a performance (acting) or a decision (an act)? Denise Mina, Garnethill, 1998 In the hands of Denise Mina, the crime novel has become a scalpel to analyse contemporary society: she is more like Zola than Christie. Her debut, Garnethill, looked stonily at sexual abuse, psychotherapy, cover-ups and the disconnection between what is right and what is legal. In an often macho genre, Mina provides a proper feminist perspective and refreshed a whole form of writing. Ewan Morrison, Tales From The Mall, 2012 Part fiction, part reportage, part autobiography, part non-fictional survey: Morrison’s book is a splendid melange with a steely eye fixed on one thing: contemporary capitalism.

Published in an innovative manner, with films online and extras elsewhere, the reader is conducted around the mall by the most mercurial of narrators and asked again and again – “What price do we pay for all this?” Maggie O’Farrell, The Hand That First Held Mine, 2009 O’Farrell is often packaged as a chick-lit author, yet the literary devices and incisive wit she deploys in this portrait of the nature of being a parent and the nature of being a child are formidable. Few authors make their narratives as filmic as O’Farrell, with flashbacks and rewinds, zoom ins and fade outs. It packs a hefty emotional punch, and lingers in the mind in a melancholy manner. Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers, 1999 The religious overtones of the title are suffused throughout this elegy for left-wing idealism, in which James Bawn goes back to his dying grandfather, a man who tried to give people their daily bread in terms of high rise housing, and meets again his alcoholic father, whose trespasses might not be forgiven. O’Hagan creates a machine for moral understanding and an affecting plea for empathy.

Agnes Owens, Gentlemen of the West, 1984 These gentlemen are not, perhaps, so gentle in Owens’ novel. With prose that reads like someone whispering through gritted teeth, she depicts and unpicks a society where behind every big man is a struggling woman. This is a visceral and poignant portrait of lives not lived to their full potential by a writer who bears comparison with Raymond Carver, and whose truths are both blunt and sharp. Ian Rankin, Black and Blue, 1997 Tartan Noir at its darkest, Ian Rankin’s eighth Rebus novel has his depressive detective engage with one of Scotland’s most notorious cases, the serial killer Bible John. Rankin has always chafed against the conventional solution of crime novels, and here we have a book where justice is delivered by monsters not saints, where the officials are powerless and where evil is both elusive and flagrant. James Robertson, Joseph Knight, 2003 The past, in the novels of James Robertson, is not just, as William Faulkner said, “not even past “. It is urgent, pressing and angry.

In telling the story of a black slave who argued for his freedom in Scotland, Robertson strips veils of smugness from the uncomfortable reality and gives a dignity back to his absent central character. Polemics and poetics coincide in this brave and bitter reckoning. Iain Crichton Smith, Consider The Lilies, 1968 This fine and tight historical novel asks a question the historical novel often eschews: is this inevitable? Set during the Clearances, we have the elderly Mrs Scott, disillusioned by the Kirk’s certainties and complicities. Crichton Smith weaves a story about possibilities untaken and chances unsought, the constraints that are imposed from outwith and within, to devastating effect. Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street, 2005 Like a ray of sunshine on a rainy day, McCall Smith has the capacity to lighten the heart, surprise the eyes and make the corners of your lips tug up involuntarily. His Maupin-esque serial novels have delighted and consoled in equal measure, and the character of Bertie, the unwilling recipient of parental pomposity, has struck a chord with thousands. The Broons and Dickens in one.

Ali Smith, Hotel World, 2001 Ali Smith’s writing is as effervescent as champagne and as scorching as bath-tub gin. Hotel World is a novel of short stories, with a homeless woman, a hotel critic, a receptionist, the ghost of a chambermaid and the maid’s sister reflecting the five stage stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Smith shows that the possibilities of the avant-garde are not exhausted. Muriel Spark, Loitering With Intent, 1981 All of Spark’s novels are stiletto-sharp and icicle-cold, and Loitering With Intent shows her at her frosty, pointed best. Fleur Talbot takes a job ghosting memoirs with Sir Quentin Oliver’s Autobiographical Association, and finds that he has devilish plans for how to use the information his members reveal. Spark sets truth against fiction and crime against sin in a parable of ethics. Alan Spence, The Magic Flute, 1990 The poet Norman McCaig may have coined the term Zen Calvinism, but it the Glaswegian born Spence who exemplifies it.

This story of four young men’s interconnected lives takes in the counterculture of psychedelia and spirituality and the establishment of the army and the twisted orthodoxies of sectarianism, in limpid, graceful language. Spence has a startling capacity for empathy, seen to aching effect here. Emma Tennant, The Bad Sister, 1978 Much of Tennant’s work is an extended riff on the Caledonian split psyche, from Hogg’s Justified Sinner, through Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde to R D Laing’s divided self. Here, the form of the novel reflects the doubling and fissuring, part narrated by an editor trying to understand the death of Michael Dalzell and his daughter, part narrated by Jane, Michael’s illegitimate daughter and, we assume (at our peril) the murderer. Alice Thompson, Justine, 1996 Erotic and obsessive, a nameless art collector and opium-eater becomes enthralled by the classical beauty Justine and her angry twin Juliette. Reality and dreams, art and life merge and blur in this gothic fable, where nothing is ever as it seems.

Thompson writes like a Caledonian Angela Carter, with overtones of both Oscar Wilde and the Marquis de Sade. Jeff Torrington, Swing, Hammer, Swing, 1992 A man in a diving suit walks out of a Glasgow cinema. Very few people find this strange in Torrington’s sad and quirky novel, where the odd often interrupts the everyday. Thomas Clay seems to be vacillating but has made a decision that will affect him and his family; as he reminisces and regrets the reader is insightfully taken to a city of boozers and philosophes, drunks and gurus. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar, 1995 Alan Warner’s eponymous heroine is a singular creation; both ruthless and guileless, calculating and chaotic, open to what life has to offer and very aware of the proximity of death. Her parochial life is transformed when she passes off her late boyfriend’s novel as her own and Warner effortlessly moves between the uncanny and the specific in this strangest of coming of age stories.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting, 1993 Begbie, Sick Boy and Renton have become icons, but if you only know Danny Boyle’s film with Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle then it’s time to pick up the book. In many ways it is more shocking, more disturbing and much funnier. Welsh’s fragmentary narrative mirrors the chaotic lives of his protagonists, and combines unflinching realism with hallucinatory surrealism. Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room, 2002 Tartan noir meets gothic erotica in Welsh’s accomplished debut, and many readers still wish for a return of her intriguing amateur detective, Rilke. A house-clearer and street-drifter, the gay Rilke brought issues of homosexuality into the sometimes defiantly macho Scottish novel. Welsh neatly parallels Rilke’s discovery of snuffish photographs with the nature of the crime novel itself. Irvine Welsh - Homeless World Cup Contact Us Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh is the international best-selling author of Trainspotting, published in 1993. In August 1995, Welsh gave up his day job.

Since Danny Boyle’s film adaptation of Trainspotting was released, Welsh has remained a controversial figure whose stage and screen plays, novels and novellas, and short stories have proved difficult for literary critics to assimilate, a difficulty made only more noticeable by Welsh’s continued commercial success. More books have followed, including Ecstasy and Filth. In 2005, Welsh married for the second time. He promises that he’s never doing it again. He lives mainly in Dublin, but visits his home city of Edinburgh regularly, usually to see friends, family, and Hibernian FC at Easter Road. What was your most life-changing moment? Football wise, Hibs vs. Kilmarnock at Easter Road. An end-to-end game where Colin Stein scored a hat trick for Hibs in a 3-3 draw. I was hooked from that point in. Personal-wise, they happen all the time. Probably meeting my wife in a Chicago bar. What power do you think football can have to inspire change? People make the changes, but football brings people together. Why do you support the Homeless World Cup? Homelessness has different intonations everywhere you go, but it’s an international problem.

People need to come together internationally and football can do that. View more ambassadors

Question: What was the first novel by Scottish author Irvin Welsh, published in 1993?
Answer: Trainspotting