Rooney has again collaborated with Oscar-nominated Irish auteur Lenny Abrahamson and Royal Court playwright Alice Birch (both of whom worked on the production of Normal People) to produce the new series.

It seems no one could get enough of Marianne and Connell or their tender coming-of-age tale of first love, and we’ve since been left with a Normal People-sized hole in our lives.Īlas, we do have something to look forward to, as the BBC is making a dramatisation of Rooney’s lauded 2017 debut novel, Conversations with Friends, which earned the author her reputation as ‘the first great millennial author’. But it’s an absolute certainty that Beautiful World, Where Are You, and Conversations with Friends will keep the heated cultural conversations going.The brilliantly compulsive TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People immediately catapulted itself into our hearts (and our TV viewing schedules) when it was released last year. Who knows what the world will look like when these new works make it to us. When Hulu’s sultry take on Normal People appeared last April, the world was deep in the throes of a global pandemic, and many saw the show as a kind of outlet for pent-up angst and desire. A few months ago, Hulu announced it was going forward with an adaptation of the author’s debut, Conversations with Friends, reuniting Rooney (who’s helping pen the show’s scripts) with co-writer Alice Birch and Oscar-nominated director Lenny Abrahamson.

The publication of Beautiful World, Where Are You is not the only thing Rooney’s fans have to look forward to this year. “I’m not trying to say, ‘Hey, everyone who’s not our age, this is what it’s like!’” “I feel no obligation to act as an interpreter,” she told in 2019. However, this whole “voice of a generation” thing is a label with which Rooney herself is not terribly comfortable. She captures so acutely the anxieties of social interactions in the time of Twitter, and whether or not true romance is possible under the shadow of late-stage capitalism. It’s not difficult to see why readers and critics are taken with her work. Rooney has emerged as a preeminent voice of her generation: young people on the cusp of adulthood who came of age during deep economic and existential turmoil.

Sally rooney conversation with friends