Irvine Welsh

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Welsh returned to Edinburgh in the late 1980s, where he worked for the city council in the housing department. He then studied for an MBA at Heriot-Watt University.

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; 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 adapted three of the stories for a later film of the same name, in which he also appeared.

Welsh's third book (and second novel), Marabou Stork Nightmares, alternates between a grim tale of thugs and schemes in sub-working class Scotland and a hallucinatory adventure tale set in South Africa.

His next book, (1996), became his most high-profile work since Trainspotting, released in the wave of publicity surrounding the film. It consists of three unconnected : the first, Lorraine Goes To Livingston, is a bawdy satire of classic British , 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.

A corrupt police officer and his Cestoda served as the narrators for his third novel, Filth (1998). The main character of Filth was a vicious sociopathic policeman. The novel was adapted to a film of the same name in 2013.

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. The book is set just after the opening of the new Scottish Parliament.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs (2006), deals with a young, alcoholic civil servant who finds himself inadvertently putting a curse on his nemesis, a nerdy co-worker. In 2007, Welsh published If You Liked School You'll Love Work, his first collection of short stories in over a decade.

Welsh contributed a novella called Contamination to The Weekenders: Travels in the Heart of Africa. 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. In Crime, Ray Lennox (from Welsh's previous work, Filth) is recovering from a mental breakdown induced by occupational stress and cocaine abuse, and a particularly horrifying child sex murder case back in Edinburgh. The story takes place in Florida.

Welsh's prequel to Trainspotting, titled Skagboys, was published in 2012. Set in Leith in the early 1980s, it introduces the Trainspotting characters and follows them as they fall into heroin addiction. Given as a series of linked short stories, the book is also interspersed with brief commentaries on contemporary British politics. In particular, the consequences of the destruction of industry in the northern cities are drawn for the young working class. His eighth novel, The Sex Lives of Siamese Twins, was published in May 2014 and his ninth novel titled A Decent Ride was published by Vintage Books in April 2015. The latter work featured the returning character 'Juice' Terry Lawson (previously from Glue and Porno).

Welsh's tenth novel, released in April 2016, The Blade Artist, centres around a seemingly rehabilitated Francis Begbie now living in California with a wife and children. It was shortlisted for the Fiction Book of the Year at Saltire Literary Awards 2016.

A sequel to The Blade Artist, entitled Dead Men's Trousers, was released on 29 March 2018, and sees Mark Renton, Sick Boy, and Spud reuniting with Francis Begbie.

In 2021, a TV adaptation of Crime was launched in the UK on BritBox as a six-episode series starring Dougray Scott as detective Lennox. Welsh worked on the project with Dean Cavanagh. This was the first TV adaptation of a book by Welsh. A second six-episode series has since been made and is currently available on ITV and ITVX.

He co-authored Babylon Heights with his screen writing partner Dean Cavanagh. The play premiered in San Francisco at the Exit Theatre and made its European première in Dublin, at The Mill Theatre Dundrum, directed by Graham Cantwell. The plot revolves around the behind-the-scenes antics of a group of Munchkins on the set of The Wizard of Oz. The production included the use of oversized sets with actors of regular stature.

Cavanagh and Welsh have also collaborated on screenplays. The Meat Trade is based on the 19th-century West Port murders. 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 Body-snatching to meet the demands of the global Organ transplant market.

Wedding Belles, a film made for Channel 4 that was written by Welsh and Cavanagh, 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. Wedding Belles was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA and was subsequently sold to TV channels in Canada and Europe.

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.

Welsh directed his first short dramatic film, NUTS, which he co-wrote with Cavanagh. The film features Joe McKinney as a man dealing with testicular cancer in post Celtic tiger Ireland. It was released in 2007.

Welsh co-directed "The Right to liberty", a chapter of the documentary film The New Ten Commandments, in 2008.

In 2009, Welsh directed the film Good Arrows (co-directed by Helen Grace). It was written by Welsh and Cavanagh. The film is about a darts player who suffers from depression which causes him to lose his skill.

Sam Leith, writing in the Financial Times, argues that: "Welsh's concerns are with sin and salvation, with the exercise of free will and with the individual soul. He's much more interested in teleology than sociology."

Welsh is known for writing in his native Central Scots. He generally ignores the traditional conventions of literary Scots, used for example by Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Robert Louis Stevenson, and James Orr. Instead, he transcribes dialects phonetically.

Like Alasdair Gray before him, Welsh also experiments with typography. In the novel Filth, 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, much like the "Climax of Voices" in Gray's novel 1982, Janine.