Annapurna Potluri's "The Grammarian"

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Annapurna Potluri was born and raised in Portland, Oregon and moved to New York to attend New York University where she studied comparative literature and linguistics and went on to earn an MPhil in theoretical linguistics from Cambridge University. She has lived in Italy and India and is currently working at the South Asia Institute at Columbia University.

Here Potluri dreamcasts an adaptation of her debut novel, The Grammarian:

I’ve been told The Grammarian is a very visual novel and would lend itself very easily to film. I’m a visually oriented person, and place and time settings are very important to me, so that makes perfect sense. I have a very strong sense of what Alexandre looks like in my mind, and that image doesn’t align itself perfectly with any actor I can think of, but one of my dad’s friends mentioned Jean Dujardin. I could certainly see that working. I saw Jonny Lee Miller in an adaptation of Emma, in which he played Mr. Knightly, which seemed like odd casting to me, but he pulls it off beautifully and has very emotive eyes, which do much of the heavy lifting for him. In the many fantasied world in which The Grammarian was made into a movie, and also attracted actors of that caliber and I had that much say over casting, those two would definitely be among my top choices.

As for Anjali, I have no idea. Most Indian actresses are very conventionally beautiful, which, aside from being a bit uninteresting, is also just not right for Anjali. She has to be a bit plain.

Learn more about the book and author at Annapurna Potluri's website.

--Marshal Zeringue