Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose visceral, darkly comic fiction about working-class Edinburgh has made him one of the most important and controversial British writers of his generation. Born in Leith, Edinburgh, in 1958, he left school at sixteen, lived in London during the punk era, and returned to Edinburgh where he studied Electrical Engineering at Heriot-Watt University and later took an MBA. Welsh's debut novel Trainspotting, published in 1993, became a cultural phenomenon — a raw, funny, and devastating portrait of heroin addiction in Edinburgh written largely in Scots dialect that was adapted into a landmark film by Danny Boyle. His subsequent novels include Marabou Stork Nightmares, Filth, Glue, Porno, Skagboys, and The Blade Artist, which follows the reformed but still dangerous Franco Begbie from Trainspotting as he builds a new life as an artist in California — until his past catches up with him. His audiobooks and books offer listeners and readers fiction of ferocious energy, black humour, and unflinching honesty about the realities of poverty, addiction, and violence in modern Scotland.