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Hollywood stalks Monica Ali, BritLit's Booker favourite
Independent on Sunday, The, Sep 21, 2003 by James Morrison
To the cigar-chomping studio executives they are like gold dust. No sooner is a new British literary sensation announced than they are being tracked by Hollywood talent scouts.
Now Monica Ali, the Bangladeshi-born writer who was last week installed as the bookies' favourite to win this year's Booker Prize, has become the latest in a long line of young British novelists to be tempted by a multi-million-pound film deal.
Her bittersweet debut novel, Brick Lane, is the object of a fierce bidding war between rival film-makers eager to capitalise on the buzz surrounding her status as the publishing industry's closest thing to a "new Zadie Smith".
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On the face of it, Brick Lane is hardly the stuff of blockbuster movies. It tells the story of Nazneen, a teenage 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 of whom Ali is merely the latest. Alex Garland's The Beach, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and three out of the four novels thus far by Nick Hornby have all been turned into successful movies. For some it has even gone on to provide a new, and lucrative, career. Garland, who stopped writing novels following lukewarm reviews for his second book, The Tesseract, is now on the verge of becoming a major Hollywood screenwriter on the back of his script for the apocalyptic low-budget British sleeper hit 28 Days Later.
While the UK publishing industry is eager to embrace the attention lavished on their 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 accolades like the Booker, the Whitbread and the Orange prizes towards youthful, photogenic authors.
Those involved with this year's inaugural Saga award are refreshingly up-front about their frustrations with the publishing industry's perceived obsession with the young. Sir John Mortimer, whose Rumpole and the Primrose Path is one of the 11 shortlisted titles, described the pursuit of the youth market as "ridiculous", while one of the judges, Ned Sherrin, argued older people simply make wittier writers.
Neither of these views is likely to trouble Ali, the mother of two who, at 36, is undoubtedly Britain's most in-demand novelist of the moment. Last week's Booker nomination capped an extraordinary year for the author, who began it by appearing on the influential Granta list of most promising young writers - despite the fact that, at the time, she had yet to publish her first book.
Ali, who is currently touring America promoting Brick Lane, was unavailable for comment, but her pursuit by Hollywood studios eager to turn her novel into a film was confirmed by her New York-based agent, Nicole Aragi. Ms Aragi said: "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."
Steven Gaydos, the executive editor of Variety, said that, like Fielding, Garland and Hornby before her, Ali had almost certainly been "tracked" by Hollywood for months. "Knowing about new talent first is one of the most important activities in Hollywood, whether that's directing, acting or novel-writing talent," he said. "Hollywood executives know everything that's going on in London, and they normally know about it at the time of the original deal. If a London publisher signed a deal with a writer today and the story they were writing sounded like great movie material, that information would be in Hollywood's hands before the ink was dry.
"My guess is that the studios were knocking on Monica Ali's door at a very early stage."
He added that many of the so-called "bidding wars" for the rights to dramatise books as films or television series were generated by publishers themselves. "It's in the publishers' interests to create a bidding war," he said. "They call Miramax and then they call another company and tell both of them, `look, on 30 July I'm going to let you read this'. This creates a buzz around a writer."
Hollywood may be brimming with enthusiasm for Ali, but those involved with the Saga award are less effusive. Sir John Mortimer likened the publishing world's continual search for the next "bright young thing" to the TV 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."
