Irvine Welsh was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he grew up in a "scheme" or housing project outside the city. He left school at the age of sixteen, took a series of dead-end jobs, and eventually received a Master of Business Studies degree.
While traveling across the United States in a Greyhound Bus, he began to jot down notes on a pad. That was the beginning of his writing career. His first novel, Trainspotting, published in Britain in 1993, was shortlisted for the distinguished Booker Prize, and achieved stunning popularity and critical attention.
W. W. Norton introduced Irvine Welsh to American readers in May, 1995, with The Acid House, his second book, a collection of short stories and a novella set in the underworld of British drifters, dopers, thieves, killers, maniacs, sex fiends and losers. The book was praised by the press as "mindbendingly original" (The New York Times Book Review).
Marabou Stork Nightmares (Welsh's third book) followed from Norton in January, 1996. This novel, which lured readers into the mind of a comatose soccer thug and gang rapist, was called "a harrowing, hard-core and brilliant realistic novel of lower-class British society" by Stephen Stark in The Washington Post.
Norton published Trainspotting in July, 1996. This book (whose title uses the British hobby of noting down numbers on train locomotives as a metaphor for the pointless lives of Britain's disenfranchised young working class) catapulted Welsh to instant fame on this side of the Atlantic. Trainspotting was made into a box office smash the same year and established Welsh as "the voice of a generation" (Jenifer Berman, Bomb) and "the hottest and probably the best of a new, distinct, and talented generation of writers currently emerging in Britain" (James Lasdun, The Village Voice).
Ecstasy, three novellas comprising Welsh's fourth book, was published by Norton in August 1996 and effectively created its own genre: the chemical romance.
Filth, Welsh's fifth book and one of the Village Voice Literary Supplement's "25 Favorite Books of 1998," was published in 1998, and Glue followed in 2001. Porno, his long-awaited sequel to Trainspotting, was published in September 2002.
Welsh lives in London.
