You wonder what Irvine Welsh wanted. Having sold more than six million books easily makes him one of the UK’s most successful literary novelists. And almost everyone knows of him – at least after you’ve explained that a film they have watched was based on a book that he wrote. An audience member at a recent talk asked about a scene from Trainspotting, saying: “I’ve not read the book – I apologise – so I’m not sure how involved you were with that, but I’d love to know how you came up with the scene, if you did.” In mid-August, when the Scottish writer’s latest novel, Can Nothing Save Us?, was released, billboards were still promoting the most recent reimagining of his first: Trainspotting: The Musical.
It is 33 years since Welsh’s debut was published. Set in post-industrial Edinburgh’s heroin-ravaged Leith docklands, and with its Scottish dialect and cast of archetypes (in Welsh’s words “the cynical intellectual, the loveable loser, the unscrupulous fanny rat, the violent psychopath”), the book was a cult hit in the mid-Nineties. But it became era-defining after the 1996 film – directed by Danny Boyle, starring Ewan McGregor and soundtracked by Britpop – was released three years later. The “Choose life…” soliloquy became a T-shirt, and Welsh wondered aloud whether there would be a Trainspotting perfume. He went on to describe the book he wrote that year, Ecstasy, as “like somebody writing an Irvine Welsh exploitation book”. He returned to the Trainspotting characters in 2002 with Porno, and has done so since in sequels, prequels and spin-offs. A second film was released in 2018.
The musical opened in July. Welsh said he had finally accepted the project after resisting for two decades, justifying his change of heart, somewhat unconvincingly, by pointing out that West Side Story was about gang violence. It opened to one-star reviews. Less than two weeks after the show premiered, he was asked on morning radio whether its UK tour would be cancelled. He said “not sure yet”. It was cancelled that afternoon; the announcement cited poor ticket sales.
Can Nothing Save Us? comes with strange apologies. Welsh says his editor called the first version “shite” and that he “sadly agreed”. He saw how to make it work only after seeing how it might be adapted for television (US producers had optioned the novel months before it was to be published). With all the help he received, he notes in the acknowledgements, “This should be the greatest novel ever written. If it’s not, that’s down to one person only; someone either too pig-headed or lacking the skill to execute everything indicated by the above. Sorry about that.”
“Irvine Welsh! Where’s that fucking score you owe me?” a man shouts as we enter a café in London’s Stoke Newington, “The London Borough of Southern Leith” where much of his fiction is set. Welsh is tall and bald, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and shorts, with fading tattoos and gleaming teeth. His drink is a peppermint tea. Outside he laughs and shakes the man by his shoulders, before admitting inside that he wasn’t sure who he was.
Welsh was born in Edinburgh in 1958 into a working-class family; his mother was a waitress and his father a dock worker. He is disinclined to reflect on his life and legacy: “It’s an act of giving it away so you can get on to the next thing – you know, I’m always going from one thing into the next.” He feels like “the most privileged person in the world” to have retired in his thirties – he used to work in local government – and spent the rest of his life writing, and, he says, he just has naturally happy brain “alchemy”. But after a few questions about what he typically calls his “poncey artiste side”, Welsh admits: “I’ll probably die massively unhappy with what I’ve done, because I’ve not written the book that I want to write yet, or whatever… There’s something – there’s some pure pulse that you want to touch, like, you know… You want to get to it – you want to get to it, like, you know.” He seems to compensate for this reflection: “It’s like a moving clitoris that’s moving around the body! You’re trying to find it!” You wonder what Welsh wanted.
The worlds of Welsh’s most prominent works are often so devastated by heroin, HIV and hopelessness that you can’t imagine them ever having been better. But his novels do advance a positive programme. His masterwork Glue (2001), which is set across multiple decades, starts and ends with Duncan and Maria Ewart. Early on, in the Seventies, Duncan, a union steward at a factory, protects a colleague who has been told he will lose his job if he goes to his wife, who is in labour. “You git tae that hospital right now, Wullie,” Duncan says. Later, we see Duncan at home, dancing with Maria and their son Carl. Wullie brings, as thanks, whisky and his six-year-old son’s schoolwork, a drawing of a family and a diary about the birth of his new sibling. Near the book’s close, Duncan dies in old age, surrounded by his family. The scenes are Welsh’s most uncomplicatedly dignified and make real the nobility of labour and the community that emerges from it, the loss of which is Welsh’s subject far more than drugs.
Of his childhood home, Welsh remembers the “emotional generosity within those walls”. Like Carl Ewart, he was lifted on to the kitchen sideboards to dance with his parents as a child. Like Welsh, Carl finds none of the industrial work that sustained his father in Leith and leaves, going on to achieve international personal success, in his case as a famous DJ. Love, friendship and work are never so simple or dependable in Welsh’s post-industrial world as they are for the Ewart parents, and you might view Welsh’s best work as a cry against this lost possibility. In Trainspotting, Mark Renton reflects on loving his friend Spud Murphy after betraying and abandoning him. After a suicide in Glue – which leaves one character “stomping his feet on the spot, like he was on fire and trying to put it out” – the friends break apart and think tenderly of each other only in sad, distant, unhelpful moments.
Welsh is not the man he was. The younger version, he reckons, would have thought his present life a “complete anathema to me”. His most famous words – “Choose life. Choose mortgage payments; choose washing machines…” – disdained any sense of settling, and argued for, he tells me, “an element of restlessness that you have to service”. But he thinks that lately he has “got past” that “kind of restlessness in me”. The change occurred “probably about 58 or something like that. Like, you know, that’s a long time to go without thinking about personal responsibility… I’m probably a lot more at ease with myself than I was then.” Where 26-year-old Mark Renton raged against the “fucking big television”, 67-year-old Welsh knows “some of my most fulfilled things have been sitting around with my mates talking about what was on the TV last night”.
Welsh has no children, but is married to the actress Emma Currie, whom he first met in 2019. His work, also, seems to display some new reconciliation with permanence. Welsh’s book Men in Love was an immediate sequel to Trainspotting. In it, Renton regrets not trying to keep a girlfriend, and wishes he had said, “I love you, don’t go.” A couple in his new book sign their letters to each other “now and forever”. Welsh told me, “I think if you’re in love with someone, there’s got to be the expectation and belief that it’ll last forever, whether or not it will.”
A young woman in Glue rues how the new wallpaper in her “scheme” apartment fails to cover the old. “She could see the reverb of the darkened old pattern underneath, clashing with the new stuff… Three coats, with good silk vinyl paint as well. You could still see the crap coming through, still make out that nasty old pattern.” Today, Welsh appears to have eased that clash. He spends his time in London and Miami, but also in Leith, which now “feels great, it feels home”. After a point in life, “you realise that actually where you come from is one of the most exotic places in the world”. He loved that his friends at the musical premiere have known him since he was six, and he describes walking through Edinburgh with a friend recently: “We’re seeing all these old mates who are ex-drug addicts and ex-football hooligans and we’re sitting outside in the sun having a cup of coffee and all that, and this is actually quite brilliant, you know, the way we’re still connected.”
After we speak, Welsh gamely lies on the café’s floor for the photographer, and laughs that his smiling photos never get used. His own advice to other writers is to “just enjoy the fuck out of it”.
Much of what Welsh calls failure is really the curiosity that drives success. He still feels his best work is yet to come: “I don’t think I’ve scratched the surface yet.” Can Nothing Save Us? is a ricochet between two mass shootings competing for the “all-American record” of most victims. It is, he says, “right outside of everything I’ve done” – but it also displays veteran ability, as when a bullet is felt as “sharp, dirty, non-negotiable”. And for all the glittering wealth of invention in Trainspotting, the subsequent work, if anything, improves on the initial success. In the way the books revisit the main characters like half-healed scabs, then divert and sprawl, always less coordinated and more improvised that we might wish. There is a half-formed coherence, something that feels true to life.
“I think this is what it’s really about; this is what age is about,” he says. “The family, the friends and the partner basically all come together in your life as different aspects of it, and you see them all as being part of the same thing. That integration, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to enjoy them all or summon them… You know, the family haven’t all died – or if the partner stuck around, if the mates haven’t all destroyed themselves on drugs – and you really enjoy this unique kind of big pool of different stuff. You can enjoy the trip that they’ve been on as well. Some of them have been to different weird and wonderful places, and they all come back with their different insights.” All told, Welsh says, “I feel in a very nourishing place right now, to have all these things, these elements, and not necessarily not pulling against each other, but it’s the sense of a kind of strange harmony as well. But I’m sure I’ll disrupt that.”
At the book event, after the audience questions, Welsh was led to a small table shaded by a gazebo from which he signed his books. He took the pen and went outside, standing in the sun and chatting to his readers – and watchers. “How you doing? Oh yeah, right, right, yeah.” Afterwards, back on stage, he joined the crowd, who were singing along to a small band playing “Here Comes the Sun”. He stood with his arm around his wife, swaying mildly. Whatever he wanted, he now has something he wants. It’s a life, and Irvine Welsh is choosing it.
Irvine Welsh’s Can Nothing Save Us? is published by Jonathan Cape
[Further reading: Claudia Rankine’s new visions]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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Subscribe here to commentIt’s a tough read, but by my reckoning ‘Marabou Stork Nightmares’ is some kind of masterpiece.
Agreed Adam! Also, when I saw him speak, he mentioned that it was nice to be asked about that book, so I think he is fond of it too.
Enjoyed this piece immensely. Always been a fan of Irvine Welsh and here I learned so much more about the man. Can’t be straightforward. A writer writing about another of the same species. Parked perfectly. Thanks so much.
Thanks so much Ian, love to hear this!