Slumdog Millionaire by Simon Beaufoy

Slumdog Millionaire by Simon Beaufoy

Winner 8 Academy Awards® including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay

Today is the biggest day in Jamal Malik's life.

A penniless, eighteen-year-old orphan from the slums of Mumbai, he's one question away from winning a staggering 20 million rupees on India's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? But when the show breaks for the night, suddenly, he is arrested on suspicion of cheating. After all, how could an uneducated street kid possibly know so much? Determined to get to the bottom of Jamal's story, the jaded Police Inspector spends the night probing Jamal's incredible past, from his riveting tales of the slums where he and his brother, Salim, survived by their wits to his hair-raising encounters with local gangs to his heartbreak over Latika, the unforgettable girl he loved and lost.

Each chapter of Jamal's increasingly layered story reveals where he learned the answers to the show's seemingly impossible quizzes. But one question remains a mystery: What is this young man with no apparent desire for riches really doing on the game show?

When the new day dawns and Jamal returns to answer the final question, the Inspector and sixty million viewers are about to find out....

Simon Beaufoy's debut script was The Whole Monty. It went on to win a BAFTA for Best Picture in 1997 and was nominated for four Academy Oscars. Slumdog Millionaire, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, 127 Hours, the climate change thriller Burn Up, and, most recently, an adaptation of the novel Salmon Fishing in Yemen are among his other screenplays. He is now adapting the epic poem Sharp Teeth and developing First We Take Manhattan, an original screenplay.