A suitable nonwhite cast for A Suitable Boy on BBC
Celebrated writer Vikram Seth’s 1993 meganovel A Suitable Boy is to be adapted by BBC into an eightpart series shot in India with an entirely non-white cast, it was announced on Friday.
Multi-award-winning screenwriter Andrew Davies will adapt the bestseller for BBC One. A modern classic about a young Lata’s search for love and identity in a newly independent, postPartition India defining its own future, it has never been adapted for the screen before.
Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, said: "I’m absolutely thrilled to announce that Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, set in India in the 1950s, will be adapted for the very first time by Andrew Davies."
Seth said: “It is a great pleasure to collaborate with the BBC and Andrew Davies...I have carried with me for a long time the stories of Lata, her family and the many people they encounter. With Andrew, I feel they are in good hands, and I look forward to seeing them brought to life for television.”
Davies said: “Lata’s trials of the heart speak as loudly to me now as when I first read Vikram’s novel two decades ago. She is a literary heroine in the tradition of Jane Austen and George Eliot.
“But behind her stands a massive supporting cast of striking, funny, irrepressible characters and a vision of India in the 1950s that no reader can ever forget. It will make a wonderful series and I can’t wait to bring the magic of the book to life on screen.”