Hogarth Shakespeare


The Hogarth Shakespeare project is an effort by Hogarth Press to retell works by William Shakespeare for a more modern audience. To do this, Hogarth commissioned well-known writers to select and re-imagine the plays.

Novels

Authors and works – as of May 2018 – include:
Additionally, Gillian Flynn is working on a re-telling of Hamlet'', due for release in 2021.

Development history

In June 2013, Random House announced the Hogarth Shakespeare series, as part of which well-known novelists re-tell a selection of Shakespeare's plays. Hogarth intended to release the series in 2016 to coincide with the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death.
The two re-tellings first announced in 2013 were Jeanette Winterson's The Winter's Tale adaptation and Anne Tyler's The Taming of the Shrew adaptation. Later that year, it was announced that Margaret Atwood and Howard Jacobson would join the series with The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice adaptations respectively.In 2014, it was announced that Jo Nesbø would adapt Macbeth, that Edward St Aubyn would adapt King Lear, that Tracy Chevalier would adapt Othello, and that Gillian Flynn would adapt Hamlet.
The Hogarth Shakespeare series intends to reimagine the entire canon, but no other adaptations have been announced.

Awards and nominations

Winterson's The Gap of Time was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Awards in the category Bisexual Fiction.
In 2017, Hag-Seed was long-listed for the Bailey's Women's Prize for Fiction.
Nesbø's Macbeth was shortlisted for the 2019 British Book Awards in the category Crime and Thriller. In 2019 it was also shortlisted for the Public Book Awards in Greece for Best Translated Novel and for the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers' Award for Best Translated Crime Novel.