From Page to Stage and Screen

6pm for 6.30pm Thursday 26th November
From The Odyssey to My Brilliant Career, we're witnessing a striking cluster of major adaptations across film, television and theatre. Why are artists returning to classic stories right now, and what happens when beloved books make the leap from page to stage or screen?

In the past year, audiences have seen Homer's epics reimagined for screen and stage, My Brilliant Career adapted as both a television drama and a musical, and Wake in Fright brought to the theatre. Screen adaptations such as The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Boy Swallows Universe and The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart have found large audiences, while classics including Picnic at Hanging Rock, Bliss and the novels of Jane Austen continue to inspire new interpretations.

Join playwright and adaptor Tom Wright, literary scholar Lynda Ng and novelist Anthony Macris for a conversation about adaptation, reinvention and the enduring appeal of great stories. Together, they'll explore what is gained, lost and transformed when a work moves between page, stage and screen. What makes some stories endlessly adaptable while others resist translation? How do creators balance fidelity to a source text with the demands of a new medium? And what does the current surge in adaptations reveal about the stories we continue to value

Hosted by Sarah Gilbert.

This live event is co-produced by the Sydney Review of Books and UTS Impact Studios and will be recorded for a future episode of Fully Lit.

Tom Wright is a Sydney-based writer who has been working in the theatre since the early 1990s. His scripts have been performed at major theatre companies and arts festivals across Australia and overseas. Work includes The Lost Echo, Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Real and Imagined History of the Elephant Man, Black Diggers and On The Misconception of Oedipus, as well as the libretti for the operas Antarctica and The Rising World. He hosts discussion forums at Adelaide Festival, and is a regular on ABC Radio’s The Book Shelf. He is currently Associate Director at Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre, where his new adaptation of A Clockwork Orange will be seen in 2027.

Lynda Ng is a Lecturer in World Literature at the University of Melbourne and a leading scholar of Australian and contemporary literature. Her work explores literary value, criticism, publishing and readership, as well as Australian, postcolonial and diasporic writing. She brings a critical perspective on why certain books endure, evolve and continue to find new audiences through adaptation.

Anthony Macris is author of the highly acclaimed Capital novels. The Sydney Morning Herald listed him as an Australian Best Young Novelist and has called him “one of the most interesting writers of our times”. His best-selling autism memoir, When Horse Became Saw (Viking/Penguin)), was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the University of Technology Sydney.

Sarah Gilbert is a writer and producer, as well as an avid theatre- and movie-goer. Her work ranges around across history documentary, oral history, literary criticism, travel writing and podcasting. She is the executive producer of the Fully Lit podcast, made by Impact Studios at UTS and she’s the author of Unconventional Women: the story of the last Blessed Sacrament Sisters in Australia (MUP, 2024).