Irvine Welsh

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Irvine Welsh

Irvine Welsh ca.2004 at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
Born: September 27, 1958 (age 48)
Flag of Scotland Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland
Occupation: Novelist
Nationality: Scottish
Genres: Literature, Novel
Literary movement: Modernism, Post Modernism
Influences: Celine, William Burroughs, Alex Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, William McIlvanney, Alan Spence, Iggy Pop, Bertolt Brecht, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Irvine Welsh (born Leith, Edinburgh, September 27, 1958) is an acclaimed contemporary Scottish novelist, most famous for his novel Trainspotting. He has also written plays and screenplays, as well as directing several homosexual pornography films.

Contents

[edit] Biographical

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. He worked for Hackney Council in London and studied computing with the support of the Manpower Services Commission.

He realised in 1982 that he had a drug problem. 'It was around the summer of 1982 when the drug problem really impacted. It became a lifestyle rather than a recreation. When you start lying and stealing, you cannot con yourself you're in control any more.' However by the mid-80s he had cleaned himself up and became a minor property speculator, renovating houses in the rapidly gentrifying North London. He concedes he benefitted from Thatcherism. "It was a painful medicine to swallow, but once the shackles, controls and constraints were off, I prospered. People who valued intelligence and ideas flourished under Thatcherism."citation needed 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 August 7, 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".

Irvine Welsh in Poland, Warsaw, March 13, 2006
Irvine Welsh in Poland, Warsaw, March 13, 2006

[edit] 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 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.

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, Ecstasy: Three Tales of Chemical Romance (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. Following adaptation into a stage play, a film version of the third novella is in production. The film Ecstasy is shooting in 2007, directed by Rob Heydon with Richard E Grant, Billy Boyd, Erica Durance, and Elize Du Toit featuring among the principal characters.

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 book, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, deals with a young, alcoholic public servant who finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on his nemesis, a nerdy co-worker.

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.

[edit] Film and stage

In addition to 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.

Cavanagh and Welsh have also collaborated on a number of screenplays. The Meat Trade is based on the 19th century West Port murders. The film is scheduled to feature Robert Carlyle and Colin Firth under the direction of Antonia Bird and will be shot on location, in Edinburgh, during 2006. 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.

[edit] 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 Scottish.

[edit] 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 transcribes dialects phonetically, ignoring the traditional orthographic practices of written Scots. Although many authors (for example James Kelman and Iain Banks) have previously depicted urban working class Scottish vernacular, Welsh is considered by many to be the master[citation needed]. 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.

Welsh is also, like Alasdair Gray before him, inventive 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.

[edit] Bibliography

  • You'll Have Had Your Hole (drama)
  • "Dose" (half Hour BBC drama written with Dean Cavanagh)
  • The Acid House (screenplay)
  • "Wedding Belles" (2007 film for Channel 4 written with Dean Cavanagh)

[edit] Trivia

Irvine Welsh books
Trainspotting | The Acid House | Marabou Stork Nightmares | Ecstasy | Filth | Glue | Porno |The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:


Persondata
NAME Welsh, Irvine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Scottish novelist
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Edinburgh, Scotland
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
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