The Moonlight director, Barry Jenkins, has announced his next film will be an adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk.

The novel, originally published in 1974, is set in Harlem and charts the love story of Fonny and Tish. Jenkins, who wrote the screenplay in the summer of 2013 while he was also working on Moonlight, has wanted to adapt the novel for years.

The director, who will also write and direct a TV adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Underground Railroad, praised Baldwin in a statement released Monday.

“James Baldwin is a man of and ahead of his time; his interrogations of the American consciousness have remained relevant to this day,” Jenkins, who was nominated for best director at the 2017 Oscars, said.

“To translate the power of Tish and Fonny’s love to the screen in Baldwin’s image is a dream I’ve long held dear. Working alongside the Baldwin estate, I’m excited to finally make that dream come true.”

“We are delighted to entrust Barry Jenkins with this adaptation,” Baldwin’s sister, Gloria Karefa-Smart, said. “Barry is a sublimely conscious and gifted film-maker, whose Medicine for Melancholy impressed us so greatly that we had to work with him.”

Production on Beale Street is to begin in October 2017.