Author and screenwriter Nick Hornby will be bringing his adaptational talents to the small screen for the first time next year, courtesy of BBC One. Hornby is adapting Nina Stibbe’s epistolary memoir Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home for the network as a five-part drama, airing some time in 2016. (The author previously lavished praised on the book in his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” column for The Believer.) An experienced and Oscar-nominated hand at the memoir-adaptation game, Hornby previously adapted Lynn Barber’s An Education and Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for film, but this will be his first effort at television writing. (The author‘s own work was adapted by NBC for 2013’s About A Boy.)
Love, Nina is the story of Stibbe’s life working as a nanny in an an affluent London home, caring for the two sons of London Review Of Books editor Mary-Kay Wilmers. Besides rubbing elbows with literary celebrities, Stibbe engaged in silly, existential conversations with her charges, discussing topics ranging from nuclear war to laundered pillows—and it’s at this point in the description, presumably, that Hornby was overwhelmed by his love of precocious youths and non-traditional families, and leapt into action to make the book into a show.