What makes some books perfect for film or television?

This week Peter Gizzi became this year’s winner of the TS Eliot prize for poetry, while Colin Barrett, Adam S Leslie, Sophie Elmhirst and Liz Hyder came out on top in their respective Nero book awards categories.

And it’s been a good week for book adaptations, too, with Conclave – the film based on Robert Harris’ novel – leading this year’s Bafta nominations. For this week’s newsletter, I found out what makes a good book-to-screen adaptation, while novelist Devika Rege shares the books that have helped her to keep writing. That’s all after this week’s highlights.

Many of the very best films began their lives as books, as this year’s Bafta nominations show: Conclave, The Outrun (starring Saoirse Ronan, above) and Kensuke’s Kingdom – to name a few – are all adaptations that feature in this year’s list.

But what is it about a book that means it will make a good film? I spoke to Sarah Fox, founder of Fox Literary, a company that scouts books for potential screen adaptation, about how it all works.

There are lots of different ways that books might get put forward to film and TV producers: a screenwriter or director might have come across something themselves that they want to adapt, for example. But specific scouts like Fox, or, as is more common in the US, in-house literary departments of big studios, are able to snap up rights to books before they have even been published – or sometimes even before they have been picked up by a publisher. One of the first books that Fox scouted for screen was Sally Rooney’s Normal People, which she put to production companies before it had been published.

“We’ll be tracking everything that’s on submission to publishers,” she tells me. If a book is by a “prestige author” like Conclave writer Robert Harris, then “it’s always a hot ticket” to get access to the manuscript, and the likelihood is that rights will be sold very quickly. “Everything [Harris] does is either under option or in development,” Fox says.

If the author of a manuscript is less well-known, then Fox and others like her will watch to see what gets picked up by publishers. With something considered more “lowkey” like The Outrun, which is based on journalist and author Amy Liptrot’s memoir, “you’re waiting to see what the reviews are like; is there a momentum?”, so a film deal might not happen until later in the process.

Are there particular genres that film-makers are after at the moment? “Romance is a sure one,” Fox says. “Every single type of producer I work with or across the industry in general, everyone wants a love story.”

“A few years ago, every major director wanted a sci-fi, in the wake of Arrival,” she adds. “But it’s harder and harder to find that kind of material that hasn’t been done before, or is saying something new, or has an interesting voice or angle on what we all see or have read in dystopic or science fiction.”

Since the pandemic, “there’s been a gradual swerve towards more lighter escapist drama” – hence the demand for romance. Thrillers also often make great book-to-screen adaptations – and blends of thriller and romance are especially hot at the moment. “Smart, sexy, psychological suspense” is popular “across the board right now,” Fox says.

But it’s modern romances Fox is after – “historical fiction’ is really hard” to pitch because of the production costs associated with it. There are exceptions, of course – “There’s always a BBC One period drama every year” – but in general commissioners say they don’t want to be pitched period books.

Relatedly, Fox will keep her eye out for anything that can be done on a small budget, for example “if something’s all set in a house, like Knives Out” or “on an island” – basically anything that can be filmed in just one location. “It’s certainly a bonus.”

But ultimately there isn’t really one magic ingredient that means a book will be a great film, Fox explains. “It’s not a science. Yeah, there are trends, and people are asking for certain genres, but it can be quite random, the things we come across, and how they end up on screen.” Above all else she says, “you’re looking for the quality of the voice in the writing”.

In a time of polycrisis, it can be hard to justify, even to yourself, why one persists in writing fiction or poetry. Lately, some of the books that have kept me going include Colm Tóibín’s On James Baldwin. In Tóibín’s tribute to his literary hero, he asks to what extent he can speak to the craft and motivations of a writer who shares his position as a queer man from a church-going family, but who, unlike him, was also a Black man raised in Harlem. I found Tóibín’s quiet daring in foregrounding this question, and working his way not around but through it, to be profound.

Another book I loved was David Attwell’s JM Coetzee and the Life of Writing, which is neither a biography nor a critical reading of Coetzee’s novels in any conventional sense. Instead, it is a meticulous study of the South African-Australian writer’s creative process, as intuited from the notebooks and successive drafts of his novels archived at the University of Texas.

Finally, it has been a while since I read a collection of essays on poetry as thought-provoking as Louise Glück’s American Originality. Glück analyses poets from Dickinson to Ashbery, but her insights on the relationship between tradition and innovation and the evolution of poetic form transcend their American context.

• Quarterlife by Devika Rege is published by Dialogue (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.