Trainspotting creator on his most controversial decision yet – including a trigger warning

Irvine Welsh’s brilliant new book Men In Love contains an afterword as shocking as anything the Trainspotting author has ever written – a trigger warning! “As a novel set in the 1980s, many of the characters… express themselves in ways that we now consider offensive and discriminatory,” informs the author’s note.

But don’t worry, this isn’t some sort of woke sell-out by the Caledonian literary bad boy whose pitch-black (and expletive-filled) 1993 debut about Edinburgh junkies helped define the decade and went on to sell millions of copies and inspire twoiconic films.

“F*** no,” splutters Irvine. “Basically it’s in there to stop the book being chopped to bits, to keep everything there. It’s either that or lose a lot of the content. The argument now is that, with the internet, everything’s taken out of context.

“So you can have a line from a book and everybody who won’t read it will see that and go, ‘Oh, this guy is f*****, he’s a monster!’. My view is that the novel provides context. The fact it’s a work of fiction, the fact it’s set in the Eighties, should be all the context you need.

“But I have to put this basic toilet-training, self-evident thing in, you know, ‘It’s fiction, people did converse like that and some still do in certain places. I’m not condoning it, I’m not condemning it, it’s not my place to do either, I’m just writing it’.”

You can almost feel Irvine’s frustration, as he continues: “When I started out, publishers encouraged you to be as controversial as possible. Now they encourage you to be as least controversial as you can! It’s the times we live in and, generally, the times are driven by conservatism and uniformity.”

There has nonetheless been huge anticipation for Men In Love – his 15th novel, testament to his ferocious work ethic – which was published last week and the 66-year-old poet laureate of the chemical generation has been one of the stars of this weekend’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2025 in the stunning spa town of Harrogate, where we are talking before his sold-out event with Crime Novel of the Year winner and fellow Scot Abir Mukherjee.

His presence at the world’s best-known crime-writing gathering, supported by the Sunday Express, is explained by his “Crime” trilogy, featuring troubled cop Ray Lennox, which began in 2008 and concluded last year with Resolution. It has been adapted by Irvine and his regular collaborator Dean Cavanagh into an award-winning TV drama starring Dougray Scott.

But while he previously returned to Trainspotting characters Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and Spud in Porno, Skag Boys and Dead Men’s Trousers, Men In Love takes place immediately after Trainspotting – making it a true sequel and explaining excitement among fans.

Having ripped off his erstwhile friends over a drug deal, Renton is hiding out in Amsterdam, trying to build a career as a club night producer, while Sick Boy is in London, hovering around the edges of porn and prostitution, Spud is falling in love and Begbie, naturally, is in prison.

The first time around they chose life – this time it’s love, with Welsh exploring what happens when young men start to have serious relationships. “I always write about these characters – sketches, notes, scenes – because they help me explain the world and its changes,” continues Irvine. “So I’ve built up a lot of material on them over the years.

“But I need a reason to publish. I need to be exploring some kind of theme. With Trainspotting, it was how do people get involved in the heroin scene? Skag Boys is the same thing. Porno was about the growth of online porn and trying to explore how that affects people’s lives. And then the Dead Men’s Trousers was about me getting involved in [psychedelic drug] DMT to see what would happen.”

Famously explicit in his work, which often sees his characters getting into embarrassing scrapes, sexual or otherwise, Irvine admits to the occasional twinge of anxiety about what friends or family will think about his writing.

“You think, ‘F*** me, what are they going to think of me?’. And that’s a great feeling,” he smiles. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling. Paradoxically, it’s also a fabulous feeling because I’m not comfortable unless I’m uncomfortable! It’s not working unless I’m squirming thinking about this. So I very rarely cut or sensor or modify anything.”

This time he found himself thinking about love, in part because “we’re living in a world that seems to be so full of hate and poison”. “Because of the way the world is, the division of labour, capitalism and industrialisation, we get serious about romance in our twenties,” he explains.

“We think, ‘I’ve got to make all these decisions about marriage, about cohabitation, about children, about houses, about work and careers’. All the things essentially get in the way of that romance.

“So you’re not equipped, emotionally, to make these decisions. But it’s almostpushed on you by society and by your own internal drives. So these guys are falling in love for the first time, seriously. They’re trying to get serious at that time in their life where their partner rather than their peer group or their parents becomes the most significant other in their lives.

“It’s embarking on this kind of strange quest that you’re not really equipped to do. And these guys are even less equipped than anybody because they’ve got this history of f****** up.” As usual with Irvine, who travels to Miami after Hogmanay where he spends several months writing every year, the darkness is leavened with a dry humour.

While Renton, the role that made Ewan McGregor a global star, will always be at the heart of the books, Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, played on screen by Jonny Lee Miller, is the “dominant character” in Men In Love, according to Irvine, who quotes Scottish Peter Pan creator J M Barrie who memorably said: “There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make.” Sick Boy is planning a society wedding as part of his “aspirational game plan” to become rich. “He’s the hustler in London, he has his gameplan, he wants to assimilate, not into middle-class society but into upper middle class,” he chuckles.

“He wants a lot but, while he might crave success, that’s less important to him than taking part in the game. It’s the whole chase, the whole kind of thriller, putting himself out on the edge.”

Bizarrely, Irvine believes his female readers have a strange kind of fascination with Sick Boy, who gets many of the book’s best and funniest lines, mostly unrepeatable here, because they’ve all met men like him. “They’ve all gone out with somebody who’s treated them badly, and has been quite selfish and narcissistic in that way,” he says.

“So they’re absolutely fascinated by this character, and while they’re quite repelled, they still feel like, ‘F***, I’ve been taken for a mug by a guy like this before, but I still kind of like him, I’m rooting for him in a strange way’.”

As for the author himself, does he particularly associate with one of his most famous characters? “Every character you write is part of you, even if it’s a repressed part,” he suggests. “You’re doing it on the basis of observation, using other people, using friends and using people you’re close to. But you’re also using bits of yourself all the time. They’re parts of me from different times of my life.”

As for the writing, he explains: “I sit down and suddenly they start to tell me what they are doing. That’s a good thing for a writer, because they write the book for you. You don’t really have to think too much, your subconscious is doing all the heavy lifting.”

Just to keep things interesting, the part-time DJ has also recorded a companion soul disco album to the novel, featuring among others, Shaun Escoffery, who played Mustafa in the long-running West End production of Disney’s The Lion King.

Today, asked if Trainspotting will be the book he is remembered for in years and decades to come, Irvine says: “I would love to hope not, but it’s not going to be thecase though. I mean, it’s funny. You get to a point where you think it’s kind of in the pantheon now.”

He adds that having written a lot of books is like “having a whole bunch of children and you love them all equally, or you pretend to love them equally”.

But he is also very aware of the opportunities Trainspotting has given him, saying: “It’s been a fabulous launch pad. It’sgiven me a forum and an audience, and a level of success I wouldn’t have had without it probably.

“If you’re a writer, you want to write, basically, you wanna be able to do what I’m doing. You know I’ve been so lucky that I’ve been able to do this for 30 years – and that’s because of Trainspotting.”

• Men In Love by Irvine Welsh (Jonathan Cape, £20) is published on Thursday in hard – back, eBook and audio; with an album of the same name by Irvine Welsh and the Sci-Fi Soul Orchestra via Port Sunshine Recordings