Clement Virgo’s film adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes moves into production

Canadian film director Clément Virgo (Poor Boy’s Game, Lie With Me) is developing an adaptation of Lawrence Hill’s bestseller, The Book of Negroes, to begin shooting next year.

Hill’s publisher, HarperCollins Canada, sold the film rights to Virgo’s production company, Conquering Lion Pictures, in 2009.

In an interview with film website indieWire, Virgo says, “The main character, Aminata, is someone who I really connected to as a reader and a filmmaker. I thought that this would be a great character to build a film around, so we contacted Lawrence Hill. I told him I was really interested in his book and that I would love to work on the script with him. To my surprise, he agreed.”

Canada Reads 2009 kicks off today

CBC Radio’s annual battle of the books, Canada Reads, kicks off today with five celebrity panelists each defending one Canadian novel they think that Canada should read. Each day this week, one novel gets knocked off (or, in Canada Reads parlance, “put back on the shelf”) until only one is left standing.

The defenders and their novels are:

Anne-Marie Whithenshaw, defending The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant by Michel Tremblay (trans. by Sheila Fischman) (Talonbooks)

Avi Lewis, defending The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill (HarperCollins Canada)

Jen Sookfong Lee, defending Fruit by Brian Francis (ECW Press)

Nicholas Campbell, defending The Outlander by Gil Adamson (House of Anansi Press)

Sarah Slean, defending Mercy Among the Children by David Adams Richards (Doubleday Canada)

For the second year in a row, Jian Ghomeshi, host of Q, will act as moderator to ensure that no one gets physically injured in the fracas.

The Canada Reads website is a good location for info on the various titles, the panelists, plus an interesting blog, user forums, podcasts, and other Web 2.0 accoutrements. Other sites have been covering the run-up to the debates, including Roughing It in the Books, co-administered by Q&Q reviewer Alexis Kienlen.

The debates run at 11:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. all week on CBC Radio One.

The unstoppable Book of Negroes

At this point, you gotta wonder: has anyone in Canada not read Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes? Released by HarperCollins Canada more than two years ago, the book has grown from a solid word-of-mouth sleeper to an out-and-out sales juggernaut, and it doesn’t look to be slowing down anytime soon. Not only was it recently chosen as one of the 2009 CBC Canada Reads selections, but Ontario Library patrons have just picked it as the winner of the Evergreen Award for most popular book of 2008. Oh, and Trent University has selected it for its 2009 Trent Reads initiative, which encourages every student to read and discuss the book.