'Trainspotting' prequel to complete Edinburgh cult fiction series

15 years after his debut novel Trainspotting sold over 1m copies, Irvine Welsh has announced plans to write its prequel.

The Edinburgh-born author is to publish a novella providing the early background of the principle characters in Trainspotting, Welsh’s first book, which propelled him, along with Leith’s drug culture, to international fame in 1993.

The prequel will follow the early decline and fall of the heroin addicts whose exploits in 1980s Edinburgh were graphically depicted in the original novel and its 1996 Bafta-winning screen adaptation.

Welsh said: “It’s about how Renton and Sick Boy went from being daft young guys just out for the buzz on drugs, to total junkies.

“It focuses on them when they are a couple of years younger and shows how their attitudes and behaviour start to change as they become more defined by the drug and the culture around it.”

The author, 49, himself a former heroin user, wrote Trainspotting while working for Edinburgh’s housing department. The idea for a prequel came after his rediscovery of notes made for his first novel. As in Trainspotting, the novella will be set in Leith’s housing schemes, and in London.

Welsh was born in Leith, before growing up in Muirhouse in Edinburgh and moving to London’s punk scene in the 1970s and fronting a band called The Pubic Lice. He returned to work for Edinburgh City Council shortly before writing his debut novel.

To date he has published six novels, as well as various collections of short stories, and screen and stage plays, and has also directed a number of short films. His work is characterised by trademark levels of depravity and realism.

Characters from Trainspotting have made occasional cameo appearances within Welsh’s writing over the past ten years. In 2002, Porno was published, a sequel to Trainspotting in which Mark Renton and Simon ‘Sick-Boy’ Williamson become involved in making pornographic films.

The planned prequel will complete the trilogy and is expected to be published next year.