Hollywood calls…

Was thrilled to receive a call from a Hollywood producer, considering the adaptation of The Weighing Of The Heart. There does seem to be a hunger for film and TV with period settings just now. Look at Downton Abbey. Critics suggest that the making of period drama, just like period fiction, is some form of escape. That because we’re going through a dismal time right now, we romanticise the past. They warn that fictionalising real events risks misrepresenting history. I prefer to think that fiction is a way, through the dustiness of academic textbooks, to engage imaginatively with the past. And that all writers of historical fiction are, really, writing about their own time.