A Vale author’s smash-hit debut novel is set to be made into a blockbuster movie by the team behind Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech.
Teri Terry’s teen novel Slated has already won several top awards and been translated into nine languages
And she has now sold the lucrative movie rights to Prescience, one of Europe’s leading film funders.
Teri, 47, who lives in Aston Clinton, said: “It would be rather awesome, wouldn’t it, a bit of a dream to think it would be turned into a film.”
Prescience, which is also behind titles such as Harry Brown and the forthcoming Song For Marion, has promised an A-list cast.
Its chief executive officer Tim Smith said it was ‘an incredibly exciting project’.
“We hope to be in production in 2014 at the latest and we expect to attract the very highest calibre talent in front of and behind the cameras.”
The book came to the producers’ attention when one of their daughters picked up Slated on holiday and told her father: “You will just have to make a film of this.”
Teri Terry – that really is her name – has met the producers and says: “They seem very keen.”
Slated was published in the UK in May last year to great critical acclaim. It was her debut novel with the second book in the trilogy, Fractured, coming out in April. She is now working on the final book, so far untitled.
The futuristic first book, set in 2054, tells the story of Kyla, whose memory has been erased and personality wiped out – she’s been ‘slated’. The government claims she was a terrorist and that they are giving her a second chance – as long as she plays by their rules. But someone is lying to her and nothing is as it seems.
The novel’s American rights have been sold to Penguin USA and Teri heads out to New York this week for six days on the publicity trail.
Teri, married with no children, formerly worked for more than a year as a support teacher and science technician at Thame’s Lord Williams’s School.