Scottish author Irvine Welsh has been speaking to Hot Press about his mixed feelings when former PM Margaret Thatcher died in April.
“I kind of felt like she was the first of the gang to die,” he told Olaf Tyaransen. “We actually had Thatcher’s name on the publicity posters – along with Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie - so it was like losing one of the old crew.”
Although he despised the former Prime Minister, the 54-year-old literary controversialist owes much of his success to her. If it wasn’t for the Iron Lady’s disastrously draconian social policies in the 1980s, which wreaked havoc on working class estates throughout the UK, he could never have written his ground-breaking 1993 debut, Trainspotting, let alone its 2012 prequel Skagboys (which has just been released in paperback).
“She was the invisible hand, she was the architect, she was the one who created all these conditions, all that hubris, whereby the books had to be written. So, to me, her death was bittersweet.”
Read the full interview in the new Hot Press, out Thursday.