West Cork Literary Festival: Home truths from Irvine Welsh at Bantry event
Emer Martin and Irvine Welsh in Bantry for West Cork Literary festival. Picture: Karlis Dzjamko
It seems unlikely that Irvine Welsh will ever again match the runaway success of his debut novel, Trainspotting. Not that he is content to rest on his laurels; his new novel, Resolution, is his fourteenth, and his eighteenth book, if one includes his works of shorter fiction.
Now based in Miami, Irvine met the Irish writer Emer Martin during his five-year sojourn in Dublin in the Celtic Tiger era (when, as Martin remarks, the upwardly mobile rode on helicopters to the Galway Races), and the two remain close friends. Martin won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for her first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, in 1996, and her fifth, Thirsty Ghosts, was published by Lilliput last year.
