Deborah Levy

The outsider author becomes mainstream as Hot Milk comes to the screen, writes Erica Wagner

- Erica Wagner

The publisher Alexandra Pringle, one of the founders of Bloomsbury, adored Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home when she read the manuscript and was certain that she'd be able to make Levy an offer for the book.

But when she took it to an editorial meeting, “the entire room looked at me and said, ‘We hate it. We hate it. We hate it,” Pringle has said. There was no offer from the publisher of Harry Potter, and a tiny, not-for-profit firm, And Other Stories, picked it up instead.

Swimming Home was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2012, the beginning of an extraordinary revival and flowering of Levy’s remarkable literary career.

Now her 2016 novel, Hot Milk, also shortlisted for the Booker, is coming to the screen, the directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, who co-wrote Disobedience (2017), the adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name, and the Polish language film Ida (2013) with its director, Pawel Pawlikowski.

Hot Milk stars Fiona Shaw and Deborah Mackey as Rose and Sofia, a mother and daughter who travel to a shabby Spanish seaside town to seek a cure for Rose’s mysterious disability. The film’s “slow, beautiful pacing underscores the contemplation, sensuality and elusiveness of Levy's novel”, wrote Martha Bird when the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.

To put the cherry on Levy's cake, her portrait, by Paul Heber-Percy, has just been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, and went on show in the History Makers gallery last month.