Everything about Irvine Welsh totally explained
Irvine Welsh (born
Leith,
Edinburgh,
27 September 1958) is an acclaimed contemporary
Scottish novelist, most famous for his novel
Trainspotting. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films.
Biography
Irvine Welsh was born in Leith and moved with his family to
Muirhouse, in Edinburgh, when he was four. His mother worked as a waitress, his father was a dock worker then a carpet salesman, who died when Welsh was 25. Welsh left Ainslie Park Secondary 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, the latter a reference to the
Ibrox disaster. He worked for
Hackney Council in London and studied
computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission.
In the mid 1980s he became a minor property speculator, renovating houses in the rapidly gentrifying
North London. After 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 has made several reading tours around the world and has been involved with his beloved
house music as a
DJ, promoter and producer. Like many of his characters, he supports
Hibs. He met an
American woman Beth Quinn, 26, when he was teaching creative writing in Chicago, and they were married in July 2005. He considers the age gap inconsequential. 'I've never felt tied to any one age ... I've never thought "I must find someone a couple of years younger than I am".' Welsh was married once before, in 1984 to Anne Ansty, however they divorced after almost 20 years.
He currently lives in
Dublin,
Ireland. In an interview with
The Daily Mail on
7 August 2006, he described himself as
"not so much middle-class as upper-class. I'm very much a gentleman of leisure. I write. I sit and look out of my window into the garden. I enjoy books. I love the density and complexity of Jane Austen and George Eliot. I listen to music; I travel. I can go off to a film festival whenever I like." He also describes himself as monogamous:
"it sounds boring but it's the way I am".
Fiction
To date, Welsh has published eight books. His 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 (Welsh's personal friend Kevin Williamson) 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 a worldwide success.
U.S. Senator
Bob Dole decried its moral depravity and glorification of drug use during the 1996 presidential
campaign, although he admitted that he hadn't 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.
Welsh's third book (and second novel),
Marabou Stork Nightmares, alternates between a typically grim tale of thugs and schemes in sub-working class Scotland and a hallucinatory adventure tale set in
South Africa. Gradually, common themes begin to emerge between the two stories, culminating in a shocking ending.
His next book, (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. Most critics dismissed the first two as relatively minor affairs and focused their praise on
The Undefeated. Welsh's narration imbued both characters with surprising warmth, and the story avoided easy, pro-
ecstasy conclusions.
A corrupt police officer and his
tapeworm served as the narrators for his third novel,
Filth (1998). Welsh had never avoided flawed characters, but the main character of
Filth was a brutally vicious
sociopathic policeman. His tapeworm was perhaps the most sympathetic character, a classic Welsh inversion.
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 aging and maturity in individuals against their will.
Welsh's latest novel,
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.
At the request of the
Daily Telegraph, Welsh travelled with a group of authors and journalists to the Sudan in 2001. A book called
The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa was the result, to which Welsh contributed a novella called
Contamination, about the violence and warlords in the region. A second book,
The Weekenders: Adventures in Calcutta, was published in 2004. 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.
Irvine Welsh is planning to write a prequel to Trainspotting published in 2009
Film and stage
As well as fiction, Irvine Welsh has written several stage plays, including
Headstate,
You'll Have Had Your Hole, and the musical
Blackpool, which featured original songs by
Vic Godard of the
Subway Sect.
More recently he coauthored
Babylon Heights with his screenwriting partner
Dean Cavanagh. The play premiered in
San Francisco at the Exit Theatre and made its European premiere in
Dublin, at
The Mill Theatre Dundrum where it was directed by Graham Cantwell and featured performances from actors
Rachel Rath, David Heap, Dermot Magennis and John Fitzpatrick. The plot revolves around the behind-the-scenes antics of a group of
Munchkins on the set of
The Wizard of Oz. The production included the use of oversized sets with actors of regular stature.
Cavanagh and Welsh have also collaborated on a number of screenplays.
The Meat Trade is based on the 19th century
West Port murders. Despite the historical source material, Welsh has set the story in the familiar confines of present day Edinburgh, with
Burke and
Hare depicted as brothers who
steal human organs to meet the demands of the global
transplant market.
Wedding Belles, a film made for Channel 4 that was written by Welsh and Cavanaugh, aired at the end of March 2007. The film centres around the lives of four young women, who are played by
Michelle Gomez,
Shirley Henderson,
Shauna MacDonald, and
Kathleen McDermot.
They are also currently working on several other projects for film and television.
Welsh has directed several short films for bands. In 2001 he directed a 15 minute film for
Gene's song "Is It Over" which is taken from the album
Libertine. In 2006 he directed a short film to accompany the track "
Atlantic" from
Keane's album
Under the Iron Sea.
Welsh recently directed his first short dramatic film, NUTS, which he also wrote. The film features Joe McKinney as a man dealing with
testicular cancer in post
Celtic tiger Ireland.
Film adaptation
In 2008, the film
Ecstasy based on
The Undefeated will be produced.
Themes
Welsh is often pigeonholed as a writer whose work concentrates on
recreational drug use. However, most of his
fiction and
non-fiction is dominated by the question of
working class and
Scottish identity in the period spanning the 1960s to the present day. Within this, he explores the rise and fall of the council housing scheme, denial of opportunity,
sectarianism,
football,
hooliganism, sex, suppressed
homosexuality, dance clubs, low-paid work,
freemasonry,
Irish republicanism,
sodomy, class divisions,
emigration, and perhaps most of all, the humour,
prejudices, and axioms of the Scots.
Style
His novels share a number of characters, giving the feel of a "shared universe" within his writing. For example, characters from
Trainspotting make cameo appearances in
The Acid House and
Marabou Stork Nightmares, and slightly larger appearances in
Glue, whose characters then appear in
Porno.
Irvine Welsh is known for writing in his native Edinburgh
Scots dialect. He generally ignores the traditional conventions of literary Scots, used for example by
Allan Ramsay,
Robert Fergusson,
Robert Burns,
Robert Louis Stevenson, and
James Orr. Instead, he transcribes dialects phonetically, a device popularised by authors such as
James Kelman and
Iain Banks. Non-Scottish readers may have difficulty deciphering the language, and may miss some of the impact and references to football,
sectarianism, and Scottish everyday life in his work. For that reason, some international editions of his books have included brief glossaries at the end.
Like
Alasdair Gray before him, Welsh also experiments with
typography. A notable example is the book
Filth, where the tapeworm's
internal monologue is imposed over the top of the protagonist's own internal monologue (the worm's host), visibly depicting the tapeworm's voracious appetite, much like the 'Climax of Voices' in Gray's novel
1982, Janine.
Bibliography
Further Information
Get more info on 'Irvine Welsh'.
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