Buccaneer Scotland partners with author Jenni Fagan to adapt ‘The Panopticon’ & ‘Luckenbooth’

Jenni Fagan

Buccaneer Scotland has inked a development agreement with author and poet Jenni Fagan to adapt her novels The Panopticon and Luckenbooth for TV.

The Glasgow-based business was launched late last year as the sister company of London indie Buccaneer Media. Its chiefs Tony Wood and Richard Tulk-Hart set up the new division alongside actor Dougray Scott.

This new agreement expands the firm’s relationship with Fagan, who is also writing the previously announced adaptation of the Irvine Welsh novel The Blade Artist for Buccaneer Scotland.

Her thriller novel The Panopticon tells the story of a teenage girl who is sent to the mysterious young offenders institute of the title, with no clear recollection of how she got there or why she was sent. Luckenbooth, meanwhile, is a gothic chiller telling the story of a cursed Edinburgh tenement building and those who live there over the course of a century.

Producer, Catriona McKenzie, former deputy head of drama for Granada TV and Channel 4, will work alongside Fagan on all three projects.

In related news, Buccaneer Scotland has also hired Glasgow-based script editor Kathleen Isaac to the production team working on the forthcoming second season of Irvine Welsh’s Crime, which stars Scott in the lead role.

Fagan described writing the The Blade Artist as “an honour and a joy” and said she was “absolutely thrilled” to be working with Buccaneer on the adaptations of her own novels.