Irvine Welsh (born Leith, Edinburgh, September 27 1958) is a Scottish novelist.

Early life

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Irvine Welsh was born in Leith and moved with his family to Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, when he was four. He left Ainslie Park Secondary School when he was sixteen 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. He worked for Hackney Council in London and studied computing with the support of 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.^*

Work

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Welsh's first novel, Trainspotting, was published in 1993. Set in the mid-1980s, it uses a series of 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 housing schemes. It was released to shock and outrage in some circles and massive acclaim in others; Time Out called it "funny, unflinchingly abrasive, authentic and inventive", and The Sunday Times called Welsh "the best thing that has happened to British writing for decades". One critic went so far as to say that Trainspotting "deserves to sell more copies than The Bible." It was adapted as a play, and a film adaptation, directed by Danny Boyle and written by John Hodge, was released in 1996. Welsh himself appeared in the film as Mikey Forrester, a minor character. The film was also a massive worldwide success. U.S. Sen. Bob Dole decried its moral depravity and glorification of drug use during the 1996 presidential campaign, although he admitted that he had not actually seen the film (or, presumably, read the book).

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; however, 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 himself adapted three of the stories for a later film, which he also appeared in.

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