Celebrating Dickens

LONDON:

Novelist Charles Dickens will be feted around the world next year in literature, film, theatre, music and art, underlining his international cultural impact 200 years after his birth. The author of classics like Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities is considered one of the greatest novelists to have written in English. Sales of his books run into hundreds of millions of copies and during his lifetime his works were even turned into theatre productions.

“The prose style of Dickens is a foreshadowing of cinematic technique,” said Michael Eaton, co-curator of what is billed as the largest retrospective of Dickens on screen ever staged. “Dickens on Screen”, part of the broader global Dickens 2012 initiative, will be held at the British Film Institute (BFI) in London from January to March 2012.

Meanwhile, film adaptations will also be screened next year in the US, Germany, the Philippines and China. Five major television adaptations will be screened, while director Mike Newell is making a film based on Great Expectations for release next year. “Dickens was very much my way into literature,” said bestselling novelist David Nicholls, who wrote the screenplay for the new version. “I certainly wouldn’t be a writer if it hadn’t been
for Dickens.”

Exhibitions dedicated to the Victorian author have already begun opening in Britain, with many more planned in the run-up to the bicentenary of his birth on February 7, 2012.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 21^st, 2011.