Novel’s universal appeal wins TV deal

Trent Dalton’s debut novel will become a global television production.

Trent Dalton is looking for someone with ‘the right balance between ratbaggery, naivety and full-blown heart and soul’ to play Eli Bell.

It is a long trip from suburban Brisbane to Los Angeles and London­, but that’s the road Trent Dalton is on after striking a deal to turn his debut novel Boy Swallow­s Universe into a global television drama.

Fittingly, Dalton will have beside­ him another Australian who has already made the same journey. Born in Blacktown, in Sydney’s west, award-winning actor, writer and director Joel Edgerton has signed on as a ­producer.

Dalton, 40, said the idea was to turn Boy Swallows Universe into a six-part TV series that was “Australian but also universal. It’s about how love conquers all, and what could be a more universal theme than that?”

Edgerton will be joined by Kerry Kohansky-Roberts from American film production giant Anonymous Content, Sophie Gardiner from Anonymous’s new British offshoot Chapter One and Troy Lum from Aust­ralia’s Hopscotch Features.

Dalton, a feature writer on The Australian, will be executive producer. His involvement with the script has yet to be decided. “That’s the next step: talking to writers, including me,’’ he said.

Casting is also to be decided. Central to that will be the role of 13-year-old Eli Bell, the semi-autobiographical incarnation of the author.

“I think it should be someone like a young Heath Ledger, but my wife reckons that’s only becaus­e I want to look that handsome,” Dalton said. “We need to find someone with the right balance between ratbaggery, naivety and full-blown heart and soul.”

The novel, set in working-class Brisbane in the 1980s, follows­ Eli and his 14-year-old brother, Gus, as they navigate a family life that is full of love, misadventure, drugs and crime.

It was longlisted this week for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and set a record at the recent­ Australian Book Industry Awards by winning four prizes. A stage drama is also in the works.

That there might be a global audience for a story set in and around Queensland’s Boggo Road Gaol is backed by the fact the novel has been sold into 34 English and translation territor­ies, including the US and Britain. In Australia, it has sold 160,000 copies in 11 months.

The TV deal was negotiated by Dalton’s publisher Harper Collins, which did not reveal how much it was worth beyond declarin­g it followed a “heated international auction’’.

The people attached to the adaptati­on are serious players. Gardiner will oversee the project. Her previous literature-to-TV ­efforts for the BBC include EM Forster’s Howard’s End and Lou­isa May Alcott’s Little Women.

Kohansky-Roberts worked with Edgerton on Boy Erased, the gay conversion-therapy drama that the Australian wrote and directed­. Its stars included Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe.

Lum worked with Crowe on his 2014 directorial debut, The Water Diviner.