The closing session of Day One at the 2025 Paisley Book Festival pulled in the biggest crowd yet. The draw? None other than Irvine Welsh, Scotland’s most famous living writer, in conversation with the ever-incisive Ewan Morrison.
Chair of OneRen, Councillor Lisa-Marie Hughes, took to the mic to introduce the pair and rightly hailed the moment as monumental. Welsh’s international renown is undisputed. His literary canon has likely inspired more screen adaptations than any other living Scottish author. But let’s be honest (and pernickety, because it’s Paisley, and we love a bit of detail): to say Welsh “kicked the door in” for a generation of Scottish writers may be more legend than ledger. That honour (as I’m sure Irvine Welsh would himself wholeheartedly agree) might justly belong to trailblazers like James Kelman, with Alexander Trocchi, Alasdair Gray, Tom Leonard and Jeff Torrington holding the torch before Welsh had published his first novel. Still, doors were certainly kicked – and have kept swinging ever since.
Welsh and Morrison took the stage to rapturous applause. Morrison opened with a jab and a joke: is it true that Trainspotting is the most stolen book in the world? Perhaps only rivalled by the Gideon Bible. Welsh replied: “Trainspotting is stolen by a better class of people.” Cue laughter.
Then came the deeper dive. Morrison zeroed in on Welsh’s novel series Crime, where protagonist Lennox, a trauma-scarred detective, admits, at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous that all he wants is oblivion. Morrison noted that Welsh’s characters often bear the psychological wounds of war, abuse, addiction – forms of PTSD before the term entered mainstream conversation. “In those days,” Welsh noted, “no- one talked about PTSD, never mind mental health.”
His reflections took a global turn. While in the US, he visited Skid Row in Los Angeles and witnessed the layers of discarded humanity: first Vietnam vets, then Gulf War survivors, now the economically broken casualties of COVID. “When fighting wars, they’re heroes,” he said. “When they return damaged, they’re treated like trash.” He laid bare the United States’ deep ambivalence toward trauma. A nation obsessed with therapy yet ambivalent when it comes to structural care.
Back home, Welsh drew a brutal contrast between Edinburgh’s Muirhouse, utterly devastated by the AIDS epidemic, and the leafier, well-funded suburb of Barnton. If Muirhouse had been Barnton, he argued, the response would’ve been entirely different. Resources would’ve flooded in. That’s the logic of class and postcode, not justice.
Morrison brought it back to the heart of Welsh’s fiction: the inescapability of the past. Lennox, like so many of Welsh’s characters, is haunted, plagued by flashbacks and invisible wounds. “It’s a hard read,” Morrison said.
Welsh agreed. On the digital age, he didn’t hold back. “There’s no physical threat any more – because no one goes out. It’s the internet that’s destroying people’s mental health.” In the future, he predicted, we’ll look at phones the way we now look at cigarettes in 1970s films: with horror and disbelief. “We live in a dysfunctional zoo where everything is poisoned. And still, we look for the one fix.”
Morrison joked that what Gen Z really needs is punk — a secret, ‘angry’ rebellion with no social or economic consequences. Welsh agreed.
Talk turned to the infamous Welsh anti-heroes. “When,” Morrison asked, “are you going to write a nice ‘Hero’ character?”
“Even Marvel characters need a dark side,” Welsh replied. “The fairy tales we were raised on can’t explain who we are anymore. Self-consciousness is the disease of our time. It leads to conformity. The same clothes. The same beliefs. Who wants to be well-adjusted to a fucked-up society?”
Eventually, Morrison coaxed him into reading from his latest book. Welsh obliged, rising from his chair, adjusting his mic. Boom!
Morrison, returning to the main theme, asked whether redemption underpins even the darkest of his characters.
“You can make a character as bad as you like,” Welsh replied, “but at some point, they need to reach for the light switch. They need to want to be better. Life’s about growth – mistakes learned and hopefully avoided. We like a trier. The ‘junkie’ (sic) trying to get clean. The traumatised man trying to claw back control of his life. There’s hope in that. People like a trier.”
What Welsh offered was more than a reading – it was a snapshot of contemporary discontent. He diagnoses our society as poisoned, but not beyond hope. His work holds a mirror to the fragmented self: the wounded, cynical, searching self of late capitalism. In Welsh’s world, characters do not arrive fully formed. They arrive damaged. Their heroism lies not in their virtue, but in their refusal to surrender entirely to their fate.
There followed brief talk of the next book, Men in Love, which is situated right after Trainspotting and deals with the main characters’ search for love. Then the session opens for questions which are so enthusiastically embraced, Councillor Lisa-Marie Hughes is forced to climb onto the stage and draw the event to a conclusion, some 30 minutes after its scheduled end.
Paisley loves Irvine Welsh, ‘that much is true’. The packed house signals something deeper than celebrity. Paisley came, not for nostalgia, but to witness the survival of a voice that has never lost its edge. He insists that real life is complicated. And he’s right.
Joe Smith
