Professor Lysley Tenorio’s Novel Will Become a TV Series

MFA Program in Creative Writing and English Department Professor Lysley Tenorio’s award-winning novel, The Son of Good Fortune, has been picked up by Riz Ahmed’s Left Handed Films and Lulu Wang’s Local Time to be developed into a TV comedy series on Amazon. The novel explores the bond between a Filipino mother and son as they try to forge a seemingly unremarkable existence as undocumented immigrants in America. 

“I grew up in a Filipino immigrant family who often accessed the culture through television,” Tenorio said in response to the news. “For all our favorite shows, we never once saw characters even remotely like ourselves, never saw stories that reflected our experience as Filipinos in America. And truly, I never thought I’d see a Filipino-centered show on American television in my lifetime.

“So it's amazing to me that Riz Ahmed and Lulu Wang, two visionary talents, see the possibilities for mainstream television in my novel. While it’s still in early stages, I’m crossing fingers that The Son of Good Fortune will one day hit the airwaves, and that Filipinos in this country will finally—and deservedly—have the chance to see some semblance of themselves—however great or small—on the small screen, in ways that are meaningful, complex, and entertaining.”

Tenorio will serve as consulting producer, with Amazon Studios producing the project. He is currently the 2021–2022 Mildred Londa Weisman Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute, where he is working on a third book of fiction focusing on the global experience of Overseas Filipino Workers.

The Son of Good Fortune came out in 2020 from Ecco/HarperCollins and won the New American Voices Award. Tenorio’s book of short stories, Monstress, was published by Ecco/HarperCollins in 2012 and named a book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as residencies from the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and the Bogliasco Foundation. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage by The American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco and the Ma-Yi Theater in New York City.

Learn more about the MFA in Creative Writing Program here.