next book of poetry, How The Hell Are You, will be published by Picador in 2020. Film In 2018, the rights to Maxwell's epic poem Time's Fool (1999) were optioned by the film director Paul King and the screenwriter Jon Croker, and subsequently bought by Fox Searchlight for development as a feature film, with King and Croker as writers, and David Heyman as producer. Maxwell co-wrote the screenplay for The Beast In The Jungle, a dance-film based on the Henry James novella, with the film's director Clara Van Gool. The film premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 2019. It will also feature at the film festivals of Goteborg, San Francisco, New York and Shanghai. Prose Maxwell's critical guidebook On Poetry (Oberon Books, 2012) was described by Adam Newey in The Guardian as 'the best book about poetry I've ever read' and by Hugo Williams in The Spectator as 'a modern classic'. A stand-alone sequel, titled Drinks With Dead Poets: The Autumn Term and set in a mysterious village, was published by Oberon in October 2016. In this 'brilliantly unclassifiable' work, several deceased poets appear as characters, their speech taken verbatim from their writings. A sequel, Last Night In England, is in process. His first novel, Blue Burneau (1994), was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize and the book Moon Country, published in 1996, describes a visit to Iceland with Simon Armitage. His second novel, The Girl Who Was Going To Die, was published in 2008 by Cape in the UK and by Kunstmann in Germany. Drama Plays include After Troy (dir. Alex Clifton), a retelling of Euripides' Women of Troy and Hecabe (Oxford Playhouse/Shaw Theatre London), Lily Jones's Birthday a satyr-play based on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, which premiered at RADA in 2009; Liberty, about the French Revolution, which premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in the 2008 season (dir. Guy Retallack) and toured the UK. In New York, Agamemnon Home (dir. Amy Wagner) received its world premiere in April 2012. Several of Maxwell's plays and adaptations have been staged at Chester's Grosvenor Park Open-Air Theatre, or in the city's new Storyhouse Theatre, which opened in 2017 under the Artistic Directorship of Alex Clifton: these were Merlin and the Woods of Time (2011, dir. Alex Clifton), Masters Are You Mad? (2012, dir. Robin Norton-Hale), Cyrano De Bergerac (2013, dir. Lucy Pitman-Wallace), Wind in the Willows (2015, dir. Alex Clifton), The Beggar's