Irvin Uelsh

Irvine Welsh is a Scottish writer, the author of the widely discussed books Trainspotting and Acid House, which were adapted into feature films of the same name. Welsh himself played cameo roles in both screen versions.

He was born on September 27, 1958, in Leith, a suburb of Edinburgh. At the age of four, he moved with his parents to Edinburgh, where, after finishing school, he completed a vocational course in electronics. He worked as a technician’s assistant in television, but after being shocked by electricity he was forced to change jobs. In 1978 he went to London, where he played guitar and sang in the punk bands The Pubic Lice and Stairway 13. After a series of arrests for minor public-order offenses and a suspended sentence for vandalism, Welsh decided to change his way of life. He got a job in the administration of the London Borough of Hackney and studied programming. In the mid-1980s, during the building boom in North London, Welsh worked as a property agent. Soon he returned to Edinburgh, where he received a degree in computer science from Heriot-Watt University.

In the early 1990s Welsh began writing. His first novel, Trainspotting (1993), is a blackly comic account of the daily lives of young Edinburgh drug addicts in the late 1980s. It is largely autobiographical. Welsh spent his youth among drug addicts and was the only one in his circle to survive the AIDS epidemic. After that, Welsh wrote a number of other books and remains one of the most popular writers in the counterculture genre.

The cult status of Welsh’s work in Russia and in the West is largely due to its depictions of drug use, but at the center of his works, both fictional and documentary, is a portrayal of Scottish life from the 1960s to the present day. This sphere includes an examination of the problems faced by his generation: housing reform, unemployment, low-paid work, drug addiction. Other themes include slang, dialect, local traditions, rave culture, football hooliganism, sex, repressed homosexuality, class differences, and emigration.

Welsh’s second novel, The Marabou Stork Nightmares (1995