Who is irvine welsh

Sign In. Down 3, this week. View rank on IMDbPro ». Writer Actor Producer. Welsh's books have made him a cult figure within the writing world since the s. Several of his books have become best sellers and all have a mixture of comedy, drama and hard-hitting issues Of his other works, one other has been See full bio ». Filmography by Job Trailers and Videos. Share this page:. Around The Web Provided by Taboola. Projects In Development Higher.

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Their lives are desperate a baby girl dies because her parents are too mashed to save her , yet Trainspotting somehow became a symbol of 90s cool.

The novel is fast-paced, shocking, amoral, written in a sweary, phonetic, catarrhal slang. Welsh captured brilliantly what it felt like to be cocooned in a heroin haze, no matter how scabby the reality. It could even be said that he created a new genre: kitchen-sink surrealism notably the scene where Renton fishes in his excrement for his precious opioid suppositories before disappearing down the toilet.

In some ways they are transformed, in others not. When Spud and Sick Boy enter the world of organ harvesting, you know things are not going to end well. I meet Welsh at the tube in Farringdon, east London.

In a woolly hat, jeans, Dr Martens and a parka, he looks like a recently retired football hooligan. We head for a pub. This is one of the areas Welsh used to go clubbing when he lived here in the 80s. Like Edinburgh, London has changed a good deal over the decades, and this pub is as gastro as it gets. To be fair, Welsh has also changed. He orders mashed avocado on toast and green tea, and bemoans the disappearance of the London that was. You sense nothing terrifies Welsh so much as the thought of growing up.

Not surprisingly, he has no children. You could get anything in there: speed, coke, smack. Not particularly great, but it was always there if there was an emergency.

There has always been an autobiographical element to Trainspotting. The original novel is set in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, where Welsh was born to a waitress mother and dock worker father. He became addicted to heroin in his early 20s. To some extent, the lives of the characters still mirror his own.

And while Begbie is a renowned artist seeking sun and sanctuary in Los Angeles, Welsh is a renowned artist seeking sun and sanctuary in Miami. He moved there a few years ago with his second wife, American Beth Quinn, 23 years his junior.

I have always been fascinated by his relationship with the Trainspotting characters. Which is most like him? Welsh says he has most in common with the main narrator, Renton played by Ewan McGregor in both films.

I write more self-consciously when I write as him. They search for something, they get it, then they think, what the fuck was all that about? Was it worth spending all the time and energy on this quest? How would he describe Renton to somebody who has never met him? He oscillates between being really cool and in control of everything, and socially inept.

Which is probably me! Welsh seems to have been far from inept in his relationships with women. He was not the type of man a woman would look to if she wanted to settle down. Despite having tied the knot twice, he never considered himself the marrying type.

They saw me as a bit of a threat. They saw me trying to seduce their quirkier, more interesting mates. And were you trying to seduce them? Welsh was never going to be a model citizen. At the age of eight, he received his first conviction, for playing football in the street. Did he get in a lot of trouble? He smiles. His smile has a touch of the Hannibal Lecter s about it.

No, he says, he tended to get others into trouble. I was quite good at manipulating thicker kids and causing trouble. Welsh is good company. 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 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 s, 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. When Trainspotting was published in Irvine Welsh shot to fame.

In August , Irvine Welsh gave up his day job. 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. 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 Whereas Trainspotting is told in a cacophonous surround sound, Marabou Stork Nightmares is a monologue.

Roy Strang is in a coma after a failed suicide attempt. For Glue , Irvine Welsh returned to the polyphonic style he employed in Trainspotting. 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 varies between a third person narrative and the distinctive individual voices of its characters. Welsh also takes away the soft-focus lens, refusing to censor his characters or sanitise their experiences.

Glue is about friendship as much as it is about anger and inequality. Porno , the sequel to Trainspotting , was published in Main content.