It was a great night for film but also for literature. Sarah Polley, author of #1 national bestseller Run Towards Danger won an Oscar for her film Women Talking. This film was directly sourced and inspired by the 2018 novel of the same name by Canadian author Miriam Toews (Fight Night). Congrats Sarah!
And Sarah wasn’t the only winner of the night!
All Quiet on the Western Front won four Academy Awards for international feature, cinematography, original score and production design. It was nominated for nine, including the much lauded Best Picture! The Netflix film, directed by Edward Berger, depicts the horrors of trench warfare through the eyes of a young man initially eager to join the fight. It is the first German-language adaptation of the 1929 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, which was also made into a best picture-winning film in 1930. Congratulations to Edward Berger and his team!
If you loved these impactful films, check out the authors and novels that inspired them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sarah Polley is an Academy Award–nominated screenwriter, director, and actor. After making short films, Polley made her feature-length directorial debut with the drama film Away from Her in 2006. Polley received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay, which she adapted from the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Her other projects include the documentary film Stories We Tell (2012), which won the New York Film Critics Circle prize and the National Board of Review award for best documentary; the miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel Alias Grace (2017); and the romantic comedy Take This Waltz (2011). Polley began her acting career as a child, starring in many productions for film and television.
Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970) was himself in combat during World War I, and was wounded five times, the last time very severely. During the postwar years he taught briefly, became a stonecutter in the cemetery of Osnabruck where he had been born in 1898, and served as an assistant editor of Sportsbild. Remarque came to the United States in 1939 and remained for the duration of World War II, but returned to Switzerland afterward. All Quiet on the Western Front made him rich and world-famous at thirty-three, but these consequences did not still his intense determination to concentrate in his fiction upon the worst horrors of the age, war and inhumanity, with which nearly all of his nine subsequent novels have been concerned.
