Lost Detectives: Adapting Old Texts for New Media

Description of impact

Creativity, culture, public understanding: creation of artwork by author-illustrator Carol Adlam; display of artwork in St Salvator's cloister area for public viewing and feedback; public launch event to increase public understanding.
Economic benefit via bringing visitors to the artwork display. But main economic benefit is to author-illustrator, Carol Adlam, as she will use proof-of-concept artwork to pitch graphic novel to commercial publisher.

Who is affected

Author-illustrator Carol Adlam.
Members of the public.
Other creative practitioners, particularly crime writers.

Narrative

The main areas of intended impact for this project are creativity, culture and public understanding. The project intends to take one cultural artefact (a novella written in Russia in 1876 and never translated into any foreign language) and adapt it into a far more accessible and marketable English-language graphic novel for production by a leading publisher in order to reach a new, and much wider, audience. This collaboration on a graphic novel by one academic and one non-academic practitioner is intended to inspire and inform new forms of artistic production and further collaboration across traditional discipline divides.
The production of the graphic novel, the public talk and the exhibition / public launch of art work deriving from the project will enhance public understanding of an important, but neglected, facet of a very popular cultural genre: crime fiction. Readers, members of the public and other cultural practitioners (artists, writers, publishers) will have the opportunity to compare their experience of reading / watching / listening to crime fiction produced in anglophone countries (primarily) with the conventions operating in Russia some 150 years ago. They will thereby develop a greater appreciation of crime fiction’s universal and timeless role as a cultural barometer and index of social development.

Impact status	Closed
Impact date	Jan 2019 → Aug 2019
Category of impact	Cultural, Creative Impact, Practitioner Impact, Social Impact
Impact level	Public benefitted - end stage