Masande Ntshanga’s (CRF 2015) novel Triangulum has been optioned to become a TV series.
The book earned the South African novelist and poet a spot on the shortlist for Best Novel at the 2020 Nommo Awards. It also topped year-end lists of 2019 across major book sites. With this new deal, Ntshanga’s work will be produced for TV by SK Global Entertainment, a company that has brought high-profile novels to the big screen like Moneyball, and Crazy Rich Asians, to the big screen.
“I’m excited,” Masande told OkayAfrica. “SK Global Entertainment are huge players in Hollywood and my brother Sibs Shongwe-La Mer is a cinema genius.” While working on the story, he says he didn’t consider the possibility of it being translated for the screen. “My aspiration was to write a good – or possibly great – novel, but I did draw a lot from cinema and TV as I was working on it.”
Triangulum, which was published in 2019 by Umuzi/PRH in South Africa, by Jacaranda Books in the UK, and by Two Dollar Radio in North America, is set in 2040 and covers four decades of South Africa’s recent past and near future. The story details the dismantling of apartheid in the early 1990s and the economic crisis of the late 2000s, and speculates on the looming ecological disasters of the future.
In a previous interview with Okay Africa, Ntshanga says he uses his work to try “to figure out my own role in society.” He has received several accolades for his work, including the inaugural PEN International New Voices Award in 2013 and a Betty Trask Award in 2018.
