Hanif Kureishi will adapt ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel To Sir With Love for BBC One.

Set in the bomb-damaged East End of London in the aftermath of World War II, the 90-minute film “celebrates the transformational power of education in the face of racial prejudice” with “a story that counters prejudice with personal dignity and hope.”

Hanif Kureishi commented: “ER Brathwaite’s To Sir With Love, written and set in London’s East End at the end of the 1950s, is a moving, tough and informative story about an intelligent man whose only hope of work – since he is black – is to become a teacher. As a young man in the 1960s, TSWL was the only novel I was aware of which dealt with the subject of race in Britain, and I hope this dramatization provides a vivid portrayal, particularly for the young, of how Britain has changed since then, and how it has remained the same.”

To Sir With Love was first published in 1959.

The official synopsis reads: “Guyanese engineer Ricky Braithwaite is de-mobbed from the RAF to find a cold welcome in a Britain which has turned its back on the black men and women who had fought alongside them in the war. Taking a job as a teacher at an unconventional ‘free’ school in the East End, Ricky faces a class of unruly white working class kids who test him to his limits. But in the space of one year, their lives are transformed under his guidance, and his own future is turned upside down when he falls in love with a white fellow-teacher.”

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