Irvine Welsh: an Edinburgh '˜inspiration'

Irvine Welsh's ascent from obscurity to Scottish literary royalty was born from an ability to capture the brutal realism of everyday life in some of Edinburgh's most deprived areas.

Irvine Welsh. Picture: Getty

Born in Leith in 1957, Welsh moved Muirhouse at the age of four where the wave of crime and drug abuse that consumed the area shaped much of his later work.

He left Ainslie Park High School at 16 and departed for London’s flourishing punk scene in 1978.

Welsh returned to the capital in the early eighties, taking a job as a training officer in the housing department.

When Trainspotting was released in 1993, it painted a raw, gritty picture of an Edinburgh rarely seen by the public eye.