Film deal underway for Anna Burns' Milkman

Anna Burns’ Man Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman (Faber) is under negotiation for a film adaptation.

Burns became the first Northern Irish writer ot win the £50,000 award last October.  The information on this year’s Booker Prize longlisting - which featured Margaret Atwood and Salman Rushdie - revealed how Burns “is in the process of negotiating a film deal”.

Milkman has sold 217,736 copies for £1.6m across all editions, according to Nielsen BookScan. It had the biggest first full week of sales directly after the announcement in the Nielsen BookScan era and recently surpassed Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (Oneworld) to become the biggest-selling winner since 2014’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Chatto & Windus).

Faber reprinted 45,000 copies the morning after the Man Booker win and the "astonishing demand" for copies saw demand continue to soar the following month with international deals secured in a further 23 international territories.

Earlier this week it was revealed that Faber will publish a special London Liberty edition of Milkman in September, as part of its partnership with the historic department store, along with a new audio edition read by Burns.

Burns’ agent David Grossman and Faber said that there was nothing to currently report on the deal.