Trainspotting (film) Trainspotting (film) Trainspotting is a 1996 British black comedy film directed by Danny Boyle and starring Ewan McGregor, Ewen Bremner, Jonny Lee Miller, Kevin McKidd, Robert Carlyle, and Kelly Macdonald in her acting debut. Based on the novel of the same name by Irvine Welsh, the film was released in the United Kingdom on 23 February 1996. The Academy Award-nominated screenplay by John Hodge follows a group of heroin addicts in an economically depressed area of Edinburgh and their passage through life. Beyond drug addiction, other themes in the film are exploration of the urban poverty and squalor in "culturally
Grits (novel) Grits (novel) Grits is the debut novel by British author Niall Griffiths, published in 2000 by Jonathan Cape. Set in and around Aberystwyth and concerning promiscuity, drugs, alcohol, and petty crime it gained for its author, who lives and works in the town the dubious honorific "the Welsh Irvine Welsh". The novel is largely autobiographical, Griffiths moved to Aberystwyth to research a PhD in post-war British poetry but soon became, as he puts it, an "enthusiastic participator in parties" and dropped out of his studies. Ianto, a character briefly appearing in "Grits" became the anti-hero of Griffith's second novel "Sheepshagger".