Sarah Polley to Adapt John Green's LOOKING FOR ALASKA

Sarah Polley, the director the acclaimed films Away From Her, Take This Waltz and Stories We Tell, is to adapt Looking for Alaska, the debut novel from John Green, whose book The Fault in Our Stars has become a international phenomenon.

Published in 2006, Looking For Alaska is about a teenage boy starting out at a boarding school where he meets and falls for the beautiful, reckless Alaska - until tragedy strikes. Polley will write the screenplay for the adaptation, but there has yet to be a director named for the project.

Like the The Fault in Our Stars, Looking for Alaska deals with the confusingly intense threshold of adulthood, full of romance and mad idealism. The later book has recently been adapted for the screen and has made $166 million so far worldwide. Author John Green has an army of fans, with 2.73 million Twitter followers which helps keep his book in the New York Times bestseller list, where it's been for over 130 weeks.

Green's work is becoming popular with studios looking for big-hitting dramas. Another Green novel, Paper Towns, is to be adapted also by the same producers and screenwriters as The Fault in Our Stars, and will also feature Nat Wolff, one of that film's actors. Looking For Alaska was actually optioned in 2005 by Paramount, and Gossip Girl and The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz was in line to write and direct it, but the project was mothballed.

Polley is a good fit for Looking For Alaska, with her previous films having a similar emotional feel. Away From Her, her most celebrated work, explores the fallout from an Alzheimer's sufferer. Polley has also won plaudits for her documentary Stories We Tell, in which she explores her family's history - it included the revelation that Polley herself was the result of an extramarital affair. Polley has also appeared as an actor in the likes of Go, Dawn of the Dead and Splice. In 2012 it was announced that she would adapt Margaret Atwood's novel Alias Grace for the screen, though no further news about it has been heard since.

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