Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh Irvine Welsh (born 27 September 1958) is a Scottish novelist, playwright and short story writer. His novel "Trainspotting" was made into a film of the same name. His work is characterised by a raw Scots dialect and brutal depiction of Edinburgh life. He has also written plays and screenplays, and directed several short films. Irvine Welsh was born in Leith, the port area of the Scottish capital Edinburgh. He states that he was born in 1958, though, according to the Glasgow police, his birth record is dated around 1951. When he was four, his family moved to Muirhouse,
Junk (novel) Junk (novel) Junk, known as Smack in the U.S., is a realistic novel for young adults by the British author Melvin Burgess, published in 1996 by Andersen in the U.K. Set on the streets of Bristol, England, it features two runaway teens who join a group of squatters, where they fall into heroin addiction and embrace anarchism. Both critically and commercially it is the best received of Burgess' novels. Yet it was unusually controversial at first, criticized negatively for its "how-to" aspect, or its dark realism, or its moral relativism. Burgess won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association,