Alan Warner

Abstract

First paragraph: Alan Warner won overnight fame with his debut novel in 1995, and was immediately linked to a fashionable grouping of young male Scottish writers including Irvine Welsh and Duncan McLean. Though he was involved in the small literary counterculture from which Welsh's Trainspotting (1993) sensationally emerged, situating Warner within this urban Scottish "school" can be misleading. While these writers took confidence from 1980s Scottish fiction by James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, and shared an enthusiasm for hedonistic youth culture, Warner's fiction has little in common with the urban realism of Trainspotting and its imitators. Distinct from that novel's stark naturalism, masculine bravado, and punk ethic, Warner's highly lyrical fiction typically centers on the lives and voices of laconic young people, particularly women, in remote Highland settings. Landscape and the atmosphere of small-town legend are central to his work, in which every place name and nickname evokes an outlandish anecdote, whose retelling becomes a vital ceremony of belonging.