Let’s talk about Welsh, baby

Although it’s a tad surprising they hadn’t gotten around to doing something like this before, Scotland on Sunday profiles award-winning Glaswegian writer Louise Welsh, and somehow manages to spend a good chunk of the piece riffing on variations of the theme of “what’s a nice girl like that doing writing about gay sex and the dark underbelly of Glasgow?” Look, I know that approach sells papers but…it’s getting old. Really old:

[I]t seems that most people, when they encounter Welsh for the first time, underestimate the power of the writerly imagination. I know this because I’ve just clodhopped into cliché-dom, asking her what by some distance is her “least favourite question”.

It goes something like this: how come a seemingly nice, respectable woman like her has got (fictionally) mixed up with flesh-bandits, drug-dealers, transvestites and other types not usually among the first to be recruited by Glasgow’s embattled city fathers to boost tourism?

“It’s such a gendered question,” she groans. The monster prawn is staring at Welsh and Welsh is staring at me. “I don’t know why I write the way I do, but it’s fiction and it comes from here.” She taps the side of her head, then points at two old biddies in the corner. “Who knows what they get up to? I go to lots of crime-writing conventions and the other guys are polite and friendly and seem the least likely to commit a murder. Maybe they get it all out on the page. Maybe it’s the romantic novelists we should be worried about.”

Eventually, the conversation turns to her new book (the historical novella TAMBURLAINE MUST DIE), her newfound love of airports, and more personal bits, including how she reconciles being anti-censorship and anti-pornography.