Lust for Life: Irvine Welsh and the Trainspotting Phenomenon - Softcover

John Neil Munro

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846972426 ISBN 13: 9781846972423

Publisher: Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited, 2013

Synopsis

In the early 1980s Irvine Welsh s life was going nowhere fast. His teenage dreams of being a footballer or a rock star were over, and he was stuck in a series of dull white-collar jobs which he despised. He was drinking heavily and experimenting with heroin. The outlook wasn't good. With one last throw of the dice he started writing. His debut novel, Trainspotting, which centred on the day-to-day struggle to survive of a group of Edinburgh junkies, was released in 1993. The reviews were good, but even Irvine s publishers didn t hold out high hopes.

Yet, just a couple of years later, Trainspotting, a dazzling collection of loosely connected stories, was voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century in a UK poll. It went on to sell over one million copies in the UK alone and has been translated into thirty languages. The subsequent stage-play adaptation of the book has been produced in nineteen countries, and the film version directed by Danny Boyle became a stunning award-winner, rebooting the UK film industry and helping to launch the careers of a squad of young Scottish actors such as Ewan McGregor, Kelly Macdonald, Ewen Bremner and Peter Mullan.

So, how did an unknown writer pen the most talked-about book of a generation? Now, for the first time, the real story of how Irvine Welsh wrote the novel that changed everything can be told. With contributions from Irvine Welsh and many of the key players involved in the book s publication, access to never-before-seen letters and rare photographs, this is the inside story of Irvine Welsh and the Trainspotting phenomenon.

About this title

Review:

'If Trainspotting was ''The book that deserved to sell more copies than the Bible'', then Lust For Life is its ''Greatest Story Ever Told''. Written by John Munro, who first met Irvine Welsh when they worked as audio-visual technicians at Telford College in 1977, it is an Edinburgh-centric account of the author's early years, up to the release of the Trainspotting film. Welsh's life has been shrouded in "a fog of misinformation", not least because of the many contradictory claims the author himself has fed to a hungry media, and Munro cuts through it to get to the facts. drawing on his own recollections, those of friends and "fresh input" from Welsh. Though no muck-raking tell-all, it is as intimate a biography as we are likely to get, and Munro is able to quote from Welsh's old letters and early writings for Hibs fanzies. A good absorbing read, which restates the importance of the Trainspotting stage play, largely overlooked after the blockbusting film.' --Alastair Mabbott, the Herald

About the Author:

John Neil Munro was born in Campbeltown and raised in Stornoway. He studied modern and economic history at Glasgow University then completed a postgraduate journalism course in Cardiff during the late 1980s. His previous publications include The Sensational Alex Harvey (Firefly Publishing, 2002, reprinted by Polygon, 2008), Some People are Crazy (2010) and When George Came to Edinburgh (2010).

About this edition

• Publisher: Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1846972426
• ISBN 13: 9781846972423
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 220