Poets & Writers Theater

Watch the trailer for Conversations With Friends, a television series based on the best-selling novel by Sally Rooney, starring Alison Oliver, Joe Alwyn, Sasha Blane, and Jemima Kirke. The series will air on Hulu in the United States and on BBC Three in the United Kingdom.

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

Sally Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (Hogarth, 2019), has been adapted into a Hulu and BBC television miniseries directed by Lenny Abrahamson and Hettie Macdonald. The twelve-episode series stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal as two teenagers in Ireland from different backgrounds navigating friendship and romance through the years.

Dracula is a new BBC/Netflix television adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 gothic horror novel. Created by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat, the three-episode miniseries stars Claes Bang in the title role, along with Morfydd Clark, John Heffernan, and Dolly Wells.

Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 holiday novella, A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a new BBC television drama. The three-part fantasy miniseries is directed by Nick Murphy, and stars Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Jason Flemyng as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlotte Riley as Lottie (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Dublin Murders is a BBC television adaptation of the first two novels in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad mystery series, In the Woods (Viking, 2007) and The Likeness (Viking, 2008), which follows two detectives investigating homicides in contemporary Dublin. Adapted by Sarah Phelps, the eight-episode crime show stars Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Killian Scott, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.

The acclaimed Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe died earlier today at the age of eighty-two. A statement released on behalf of his family described the author as one of the great literary voices of his time, whose wisdom was an inspiration to all who knew him. The Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan said Professor Achebe would live forever in the hearts and minds of present and future generations. BBC’s Bilkisu discusses his legacy with Stephen Sackur.

On April 15 Little, Brown will publish The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's final, unfinished novel. In this BBC documentary, Geoff Ward discusses the life and works of the author who committed suicide in 2008, at the age of forty-six. Ward also talks to Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch, about the difficult task of assembling Wallace's final fragments into The Pale King.