Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1958, one of the most distinctive and provocative voices in modern British fiction.
Raised in the council housing schemes of Edinburgh, he passed through the London punk scene of the late 1970s before returning north, working for the city council and taking an MBA. His fiction is instantly recognisable: written largely in phonetically transcribed Edinburgh Scots, playing with typography and voice, and unflinching in its portrayal of working-class life, addiction, boredom and alienation.
His debut, Trainspotting, following a group of young heroin users in 1980s Edinburgh, became a defining novel of its generation and, in Danny Boyle's 1996 film, an era-defining piece of cinema. He has continued to mine the same raw, blackly comic seam across Marabou Stork Nightmares, the short-story collection The Acid House, the corrupt-policeman nightmare of Filth, and the Trainspotting sequel Porno, several of them also adapted for screen.
Fierce, funny and profane, and a lifelong Hibernian supporter and advocate of Scottish independence, he writes with a bruising honesty that few of his contemporaries can match.
