Picnic at Hanging Rock writer Beatrix Christian is to adapt Emily Bitto’s novel The Strays with Killing Eve director Shannon Murphy as a six-part TV series.
The pair are working on the adaptation with Jo Monk’s Apogee Pictures, the producer behind Diane Keaton-fronted feature Hampstead, and See Pictures, the company behind Simon Baker’s Breath.
Murphy is attached to direct, off the back of her debut feature film Babyteeth, starring Ben Mendelsohn, Essie Davis and Eliza Scanlen, which premiered in competition at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this year. She is currently working on the third season of Killing Eve.
See Pictures’ Sonia Borella will produce with Monk.
Inspired by the Australian artist collective Heide Circle, The Strays explores what happens when a violent act in the past of a subversive group of artists is linked to the death of a young woman in the present. One of those involved must decide whether to expose a now influential member of the establishment, in order to prevent further tragedy.
Bitto’s The Strays was published in Australia and New Zealand by Affirm Press, in North America by Hachette, in the UK by Legend Press, with translation rights represented by Curtis Brown UK.
Christian said, “The Strays is an incendiary device beautifully disguised as a girl’s memoir and it is absolutely current. It explores a frightening blind-spot in the worldview of people who are otherwise progressive.”
Sonia Borella and Jo Monk added, “We’re thrilled to be collaborating in adapting Emily Bitto’s brilliant and timely novel. To be working with some of Australia’s most formidable and exciting talent is a testament to the strength of the material. Set against the hedonistic art world of 1930s Sydney, and 1970s London during the rise of the feminist movement, the series is a searing psycho-sexual drama that brings into sharp focus some pressing questions about sex, power, complicity and blame.”