ABC commissions Ruby Entertainment to adapt The Secret River

Stephen Luby and Mark Ruse of Ruby Entertainment will start work on a TV mini-series adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel The Secret River.

The announcement:

The ABC has committed to the development of acclaimed Australian novel, The Secret River, by author Kate Grenville, as a television mini-series. The novel won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2006 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the same year.

Through the deeply personal story of a young couple, William and Sal Thornhill, The Secret River dramatises the colonisation of Australia and the escalating conflict between the original Indigenous inhabitants and the newly arrived white settlers. In this epic tragedy, Will Thornhill, a former convict, brutally treated and impoverished in England, is lead by desperation, fear and ambition towards a crime of terrible savagery.