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Hollywood lures Dhaka`s Ali: The Asian Age
London, Sept 22: Now Monica Ali, the British Asian author who is the bookies` favourite to win this year`s Booker Prize, is being lured by Hollywood producers for a multimillion-pound film deal.
London, Sept 22: Now Monica Ali, the British Asian author who is the bookies’ favourite to win this year’s Booker Prize, is being lured by Hollywood producers for a multimillion-pound film deal.
Her debut novel, Brick Lane, is the object of a fierce bidding war between rival filmmakers eager to capitalise on the buzz surrounding her newfound literary status. Brick Lane is a simple story of Nazneen, a teenaged girl from Bangladesh who ekes out a painful existence in the shadow of a domineering husband twice her age in a cramped flat in London’s Tower Hamlets.
However, in recent years, the call from Hollywood has become an almost inevitable rite of passage for a succession of young British literary sensations, including Alex Garland’s The Beach and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Dhaka-born Ali, daughter of a Bangladeshi father and English mother and herself a mother of two, is undoubtedly Britain’s most in-demand novelist of the moment. Last week’s Booker nomination capped an extraordinary year for the 36-year-old author, who began it by appearing on the influential Granta list of most promising young writers even before her book was published.
Her pursuit by Hollywood studios eager to turn her novel into a film was confirmed by her New York-based agent, Nicole Aragi, who told The Independent on Sunday: "Monica was on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and when that happens to a writer people connected with Hollywood are on the phone. We’ve had lots of general queries about movies. It’s something one hopes will come about with a really intelligent director involved."
While the UK publishing industry is eager to embrace the attention lavished on its rising literary stars by the major film studios, not everyone is so happy. This week sees the presentation of the first Saga Award for Wit, a new book prize aimed solely at writers over the age of 50. It has been conceived as a riposte to what its organisers regard as the unfair bias of other prizes towards youthful, photogenic authors.
Sir John Mortimer, involved with the award, likened the publishing world’s continual search for the next "bright young thing" to the television industry’s obsession with capturing youthful viewers.
"Chasing the youth market is ridiculous," he said, adding that publishers were wrong to assume that young readers necessarily wanted to read the work of young writers. "Rumpole actually has quite a young audience, particularly among students," he said. "We shouldn’t be encouraging young people to read things like Harry Potter. They should be reading Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Evelyn Waugh."
Her debut novel, Brick Lane, is the object of a fierce bidding war between rival filmmakers eager to capitalise on the buzz surrounding her newfound literary status. Brick Lane is a simple story of Nazneen, a teenaged girl from Bangladesh who ekes out a painful existence in the shadow of a domineering husband twice her age in a cramped flat in London’s Tower Hamlets.
However, in recent years, the call from Hollywood has become an almost inevitable rite of passage for a succession of young British literary sensations, including Alex Garland’s The Beach and Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Dhaka-born Ali, daughter of a Bangladeshi father and English mother and herself a mother of two, is undoubtedly Britain’s most in-demand novelist of the moment. Last week’s Booker nomination capped an extraordinary year for the 36-year-old author, who began it by appearing on the influential Granta list of most promising young writers even before her book was published.
Her pursuit by Hollywood studios eager to turn her novel into a film was confirmed by her New York-based agent, Nicole Aragi, who told The Independent on Sunday: "Monica was on the cover of The New York Times Book Review, and when that happens to a writer people connected with Hollywood are on the phone. We’ve had lots of general queries about movies. It’s something one hopes will come about with a really intelligent director involved."
While the UK publishing industry is eager to embrace the attention lavished on its rising literary stars by the major film studios, not everyone is so happy. This week sees the presentation of the first Saga Award for Wit, a new book prize aimed solely at writers over the age of 50. It has been conceived as a riposte to what its organisers regard as the unfair bias of other prizes towards youthful, photogenic authors.
Sir John Mortimer, involved with the award, likened the publishing world’s continual search for the next "bright young thing" to the television industry’s obsession with capturing youthful viewers.
"Chasing the youth market is ridiculous," he said, adding that publishers were wrong to assume that young readers necessarily wanted to read the work of young writers. "Rumpole actually has quite a young audience, particularly among students," he said. "We shouldn’t be encouraging young people to read things like Harry Potter. They should be reading Dickens, Wilkie Collins and Evelyn Waugh."