Irvine Welsh, the Scottish writer who wrote Trainspotting, revealed last night that he is returning to the world of his most famous characters in two separate projects - a written "prequel" to Trainspotting, and a film version of the Trainspotting sequel, Porno.
Speaking at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Welsh said he had entered into "serious" talks with the writer/producer team behind the successful movie version of Trainspotting - writer John Hodge and producer Andrew Macdonald - for the first time recently, and would be working on getting the film made this autumn.
He also said he had resurrected notes which he had discarded about the lives of Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie and the rest of the main characters from Trainspotting - largely written about heroin addicts in Edinburgh - before the events of the book, and was working with them again.
"I am working on a prequel part to Trainspotting," the writer, who now mainly lives in Ireland and the US, said.
"I worked on it at the time I was writing Trainspotting but it was shelved because I just didn't have the time to finish it."
He added: "I don't know whether they will be a sequel to Porno, though.
"We've been talking about doing a sequel film for the first time probably.
"It's the first time that me and John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald have sat down and properly talked about it, we are just starting to get our heads into it, working into the autumn.
"But if I write the prequel, if I write another book as well, it will start getting ridiculous - it will start being like the Harry Potter stories, or an Inspector Rebus-type thing and I really don't want to do that."
Welsh was at the festival to talk about his new book, Crime, which sees an off-duty policeman get involved in the world of paedophilia rings in the US.
He said the grim subject matter was in part written "against" what he sees as the inadequate portrayal of paedophilia in the celebrated book Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which was published in 1955.
"I have been living in Ireland for the past four years, and you cannot pick up a paper without reading about all this stuff, usually to do with priests," he said.
"You are saturated with stories about paedophilia in the Irish media.
"I don't think when Lolita came out, people really realised what this stuff did to people - there is this canonisation of Nabokov.
"Humbert Humbert its main character is portrayed as if he is an aesthete, as if he is above the rest of society, and that somehow his behaviour is OK," he said.
"I feel I was writing against that."
The writer admitted he felt he had been "spoiled" by the phenomenal success of both the book and the film of Trainspotting.
Welsh said: "I was totally spoiled. I got to the stage where I thought I could photocopy my gas bill 200 times and send it off to the publishers and I would still get it published.
"I think I even did that. But I got told: this isn't going to work."
The writer said he now regarded Trainspotting as a "blank cheque" rather than a "albatross around my neck".
