Seeking new sponsors

Could the TV and film industries be persuaded to sponsor book prizes, wonders Boyd Tonkin in The Independent. After all, they rely on literature for much of their inspiration.

More than ever before, the big and small screens both depend on books for much of their most popular - and prestigious - raw material. For millions of contented viewers, the autumn and Christmas seasons will have passed in a long, luxurious banquet of quality adaptations, as cinema and television feasted on the creative flesh of Charles Dickens, J K Rowling, Jane Austen, John le Carré, C S Lewis, Ian Rankin and so, indefinitely, on. If you fancy a promising new movie this month, then Brokeback Mountain (from Annie Proulx) opens today; Memoirs of a Geisha and Jarhead (respectively, Arthur Golden and Anthony Swofford) next week; even, remarkably, A Cock and Bull Story (from Sterne's Tristram Shandy) in a fortnight's time.