(1961- )

The writings of Scottish author Irvine Welsh have been described as shocking, disturbing, hilarious and even surreal, but they certainly aren't boring.

Welsh was born in 1961 and grew up in Edinburgh housing projects, He is a member of the British equivalent of the frequently puzzled-over group known as "Gen-Xers". Welsh's first book, the short-story collection The Acid House, was published in 1994 to moderate success. It was followed later that year by perhaps his best-known novel, Trainspotting, a collection of connected stories about several Glasgow heroin junkies. This book was a huge success: it was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize, remained on bestseller lists for more than two years and put Welsh at the center of a media phenomenon. For a while, the media's constant attention was overwhelming and prompted him to retreat to relative anonymity in Amsterdam.

In 1995, Trainspotting was adapted for the stage, and Welsh published his second novel, The Marabou Stork Nightmares. This book is an almost hallucinatory story of a Scotsman on a quest in South Africa to eliminate a predatory bird known as, you guessed it, the Marabou Stork. Welsh published his fourth book, and second short story collection, the following year under the title Ecstasy. Also in 1996, the hit film adaptation of Trainspotting was released, bringing even more attention to Welsh and jump-starting the careers of both Ewan MacGregor and Robert Carlyle.

The latest from Irvine Welsh, his fifth book, is the novel Filth (1999). It is the story of a corrupt, sexist, racist, and all-around nasty Scottish policeman named Bruce Robertson. The novel is also interspersed with the musings of Robertson's tapeworm, who constantly laments the fact that he is only a mere intestinal parasite and therefore incapable of sharing his thoughts with the world.

Welsh has received some comparisons to Irish writer Roddy Doyle, comparisons which are certainly not inaccurate. Certainly Welsh's work has spoken for Scottish youth in the same manner that Doyle has spoken for the Irish working class, and both authors tend to write dialogue phonetically, but that's about as far as the similarity goes. Welsh's writing has a very surreal aspect to it, complemented by the incredible "stream of consciousness" monologues his characters frequently engage in.

Sport though, when it has a cultural locus, becomes a source of identity to people. Lose such sources of identity, and you have an atomised, disjointed society. Sport can move some people in a way that the profit motive can never. Our values have become obscured and warped to the extent that the means for self-actualisation, i.e. money, has become an end in itself. One of the ends is the appreciation of sport. Another might be art. Another might be the precipitation of chaos.
The Marabou Stork Nightmares