Born and brought up in Oban in a house without a bookcase, Alan Warner is not your typical Ivory Tower intellectual. Now 17 years into his professional writing career, he's just been appointed the position of writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh.

 His is an encouraging success story for any aspiring authors, and I began by asking just how he managed it.
"I got into writing through reading, through books," Warner told me, admitting that without encouragement to read from home, his only reason for reading André Gide's The Immoralist was because it looked "vaguely salacious". The emotional effect the book had on him was so stunning and surprising that he immediately became a voracious reader of whatever Penguin classics happened to be displayed in Menzie's bookshop.
He developed a nonsensical and eclectic range of reading and is ashamed to admit he had no concept of an existing contemporary Scottish literature. Growing up in Oban, he felt isolated and lonely in the years spent discovering his love of literature.  For him, "literature was something that happened elsewhere". John Buchan, Walter Scott and even some of Muriel Spark he found to be "retrospective" - distanced from his Scotland by decades or centuries.
It was not until he saw the artwork from Alastair Gray's Lanark in a shop window that these opinions of literature began to change, remarking to his friend: "Oh look at that! There actually are people in Scotland writing books, then?". With the publication of James Kelman's Not Not While the Giro, Warner had found something new and exciting; something completely different to "elsewhere" literature. "Suddenly there were all these voices appearing around me and they were comforting. What they were saying wasn't necessarily comforting, but the fact they existed was".
When he moved to London the presence of this particularly Scottish literature became important to him. Being very homesick prompted a strong attachment to a Scottish culture he did not feel isolated from, in which he would later become a powerful voice. He felt he was "preserving something" by reading - "staying in touch with a culture through books". In his youth he had thought books to be "like James Bond" but literature at this point was a crucial driving force in his sense of identity.
Then he began taking notes, picking out beautiful or striking passages from books and organising them - "and very quickly you become a kind of writer yourself". And that was it. He developed a compulsion to write even though he couldn't quite afford it (without money for Tipp-Ex he used milk of magnesium to cover mistakes). His first novel (which he intended as a manuscript to be found posthumously revealing his hidden genius) was published thanks to The Clocktower Press at the same time as Trainspotting.
He's not an author with a "writing shed" at the bottom of the garden or even a study of any sort. He sees no difference in his writing quality whether he's sat in a room with no distractions or whether he's sitting next to his wife making her way through Tomb Raider. He says, "I've never come close to working out why you have good days and bad days", but it is nothing to do with the environment in which he writes. "It's graft not craft" though, he concludes.
Unusually, Warner begins writing his novels in longhand "so it doesn't feel like a book - it feels like language. If you go straight to the computer you can see the shape of the page, the page is a ghost of the book. It suggests the book is going to come".
As a part of Warner's position as writer-in-residence he will be offering creative writing workshops open to all students. He describes teaching writing as being like a mountaineering course: "all you can do is say - I would go up the mountain this way, I would approach it this way, but I can't go up that mountain for you. They have to climb it themselves".
His final piece of advice for aspiring writers, and all students in general, is to stay out of the pub and read. Or read in the pub; though he admits things will get a little hazy after three drinks.
Alan Warner's new book Dead Man's Pedal will be published in the Spring of next year.