Elisabeth Moss via Instagram

Emmy Award-winning actor Elisabeth Moss, known for her roles in Mad Men and The Handmaid’s Tale, will star in the TV adaptation of The Shinning Girls by Lauren Beukes, one of South Africa’s foremost speculative fiction writers.

In 2013, we reported that the rights to Beukes’ fourth novel The Shining Girls had been acquired by Media Rights Capital and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions. There hadn’t been news about the progress of the series adaptation until recently.

According to Deadline, Apple TV has green-lit the series. Moss will serve as executive producer alongside Lindsey McManus under their Love & Squalor Pictures umbrella. DiCaprio, who co-acquired the rights to the novel in 2013 will executive produce alongside Jennifer Davisson via Appian Way Productions. Beukes and Alan Page Arriaga will also serve as executive producers. The series will be produced by MRC Television.

The Shinning Girls is a crime thriller about a time-traveling serial killer. It is set in Chicago and spans the decades between the 1930s and 1990s.

Lauren Beukes via Wikipedia

Superb news for Lauren Beukes who joins an array of African authors to have their books adapted for film and television, including Wole Soyinka and Lola Shoneyin for Death and the Kings Horseman and The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives respectively, Jacqui L’Ange’s The Seed Thief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah, Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation, Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death? Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, and  Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King.