Poets & Writers Theater

“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.

“I’m very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities, almost like accessories which people can fill their homes with,” says Sally Rooney in this interview at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (Hogarth, 2019), was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and will be adapted into a television series.