Angela Makholwa’s second novel The 30th Candle is coming to Netflix as Love, Sex & 30 Candles on Friday, August 18, 2023.
Angela Makholwa burst onto the South African literary scene when her debut novel Red Ink centering on a serial killer was published by Pan Macmillan in 2007. Three years later, the Johannesburg-based writer gave us a new novel The 30th Candle which focused on four urban women in South Africa turning thirty. We regretted carrying it on a work assignment as the book moored us on a beach in Seychelles establishing her as one of our favourite South African writers.
News of books by authors being optioned for film usually doesn’t turn out too well. We got the news that Makholwa’s book Black Widow Society was going into production in 2019. Little has been heard of it since. We heard that Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s novel Matigari had gone into production in 2018. Little has been heard of it since. We reported that Lauren Beukes’ The Shining Girls had been optioned by a Leonardo Dicaprio production company back in 2013. That project made it to Apple TV in 2022, a whole nine years later. The novel-to-movie pipeline is one of the rarest calls to make for many writers, even rarer for writers of African descent. This would be the hardest space for someone like super football news reporter Fabricio Romano to call with his infamous, “Here We Go.”
We are getting news that Angela Makholwa’s The 30th Candle has been optioned by Sorele Media for Netflix and goes by the name Love, Sex & 30 Candles. It stars Amo Chidi, Gabisile Tshabalala, Candice Modiselle, and Bahumi Mhlongo with a supporting cast of Lunga Shabalala, Loyiso McDonald, Anthony Oseyemi, and Terence Bridgett. It will be available for streaming on August 18.
If this movie is anything like the book, I recommend that you set aside time and not plan on anything else for that evening. So, this is one of the few times in this genre, I am happy to say;
Angela Makholwa’s The 30th Candle for Netflix as Love, Sex & 30 Candles on August 18. Here We Go! #NovelToCinema
Check out the trailer below.
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