Christmas has come early for Kiwi Anthony McCarten

Anthony McCarten, the internationally successful novelist, playwright and director/writer who's London-based these days is getting his gifts early this year.

Ian Fitzgibbon’s film adaptation of McCarten's acclaimed novel, Death of a Superhero, has won the Audience Choice Prize and the Young Jury Prize awarded by students from Bourg Saint Maurice at this year’s Les Arcs European Film Festival.

The film stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and is about a 15-year-old boy who is dying of cancer who tries to enjoy the end of his life by drawing a world in which an invincible superhero battles a deadly nemesis with his sexy sidekick.

McCarten’s follow up novel, In the Absence of Heroes, is being released 3 February. The new novel revisits the Delpes a year after Donny’s death to find the family falling apart, lost in their grief. 

Anthony McCarten will be in New Zealand in May to take part in the ‘Auckland Writers & Readers Festival’.