Irvine Welsh

Born on September 27, 1958, in Leith, the port district of Edinburgh, Irvine Welsh moved with his family at the age of four to Muirhouse, a council housing scheme on the city's northern edge. His mother worked as a waitress, and his father was a docker in Leith until ill health forced him out, after which he sold carpets; he died when his son was twenty-five. Welsh left Ainslie Park High School at sixteen, took a City and Guilds course in electrical engineering, and was apprenticed as a television repairman until an electric shock put him in hospital. In 1978 he went south to the London punk scene, playing guitar and then bass in a band called the Pubic Lice, and by his own account spent eighteen months of his early twenties addicted to heroin. He worked for Hackney Council and studied computing, then came home to Edinburgh in the late 1980s to a job in the city council's housing department, later taking an MBA at Heriot-Watt University. Working from his old diaries, he began placing episodes in small Scottish magazines and pamphlets from 1991, among them Kevin Williamson's Rebel Inc, and in 1992 Robin Robertson of Secker & Warburg bought the novel they came from. Trainspotting (1993), a run of linked episodes about a circle of friends in the heroin years of 1980s Leith, told in the phonetic Scots of the city's schemes, met outrage in some quarters and acclaim in others, and Danny Boyle's film of 1996 carried it around the world. The Acid House (1994), Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995), Ecstasy (1996) and Filth (1998) followed, then Glue (2001), the sequel Porno (2002) and the prequel Skagboys (2012). He has written plays and screenplays, many of them with Dean Cavanagh, directed short films, and lived for long spells in Dublin, Chicago and Miami, while his fiction has stayed almost wholly in Scotland. His books have sold some six million copies.

Robin Robertson, an editor at Secker & Warburg, had read Welsh's pieces in New Writing Scotland and a Clocktower Press pamphlet and taken them for stories, until Duncan McLean told him they belonged to a novel. He asked for the typescript and met its author at the City Café in Edinburgh, where Welsh said so little that Robertson did most of the talking.