Irvine Welsh was born in 1958 in Leith, the port suburb of Edinburgh, where he grew up and set part of his works. Having left school at sixteen, he scraped a living doing odd jobs and became deeply entangled in drug addiction. It was his total immersion in musical subcultures—first the London punk scene and later the rave explosion of the early nineties—that prompted him to gather notes and become a writer. His career took off immediately after the publication of Trainspotting in 1993: the rawness with which his prose, dense with dialectal elements, captures the hardship and poverty of a group of Scottish drug addicts, deeply impacted the imagination of the nineties and beyond. It has inspired many future writers through its prequels and spin-offs, and garnered massive public attention thanks to Danny Boyle's flawless film adaptation starring Ewan McGregor as the protagonist Mark "Rent Boy" Renton. Since then, Welsh has continued to craft narrative scores and short stories that make him an indispensable voice among the British writers of his generation. His literary universe has expanded further thanks to a thriller trilogy (Crime, The Long Knives, Resolution), adapted into a successful TV series in 2021, and the highly anticipated Men in Love, which follows the destinies of the novel's unforgettable characters just a few years after their striking first appearance.