"Trainspotting" & "Men in Love"

German premiere - reading and moderated conversation

Irvine Welsh comes to Hamburg for the first time. The Scottish author who became internationally famous thirty years ago with "Trainspotting", whose film adaptation by Danny Boyle (1995) achieved cult status, will perform excerpts from his newly published novel "Men in Love" - and will sign both the new novel and a specially reissued edition of "Trainspotting".

"Men in Love" is the German premiere: the novel fills a gap in the narrative timeline and asks what happened immediately after the underground era of punk and drug intoxication - how Mark Renton, Sick Boy, Spud and Begbie grow up without betraying their dreams, and what happens when the Trainspotting gang searches for love. The book is a portrait of a generation, a post-punk narrative set in Scotland in the late eighties.

The evening is moderated by Thorsten Nagelschmidt - singer, lyricist and guitarist of the punk band Muff Potter, and author of the novels "Der Abfall der Herzen" (2018), "Arbeit" (2020) and "Nur für Mitglieder" (2025). In the conversation, two voices from literature, pop and punk meet.

Two voices about Welsh that frame the evening:
"Irvine Welsh writes with skill, wit and compassion - an art that borders on genius. He is the best thing that has happened to British literature in decades." - Nick Hornby
"Irvine Welsh is the real deal: an impressive mix of nihilism and heartache, precise realism - especially in dialect and tone - and almost archetypal universality." - David Foster Wallace