The Slap snapped up – Christos Tsiolkas’s novel on the small screen

Rebecca Starford

Local television drama is about to get a much-needed boost: Matchbox Pictures has purchased the rights to produce a television adaptation of The Slap, the recent winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Award-winning director Tony Ayres, one of five partners at Matchbox, hopes the series will unfold over eight episodes, just as Christos Tsiolkas’s novel is told over eight chapters from eight different points of view. Ayres said the series would be shot around the inner-Melbourne suburbs of Fitzroy and Northcote, where The Slap is set. Ayres believes that the novel lends itself to film as it is ‘about intimate human relations and television is such a fantastic medium to for that’.