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LSU honors college alumni turns novel into a TV series

BATON ROUGE, La. (BRPROUD) — A Baton Rouge native author has accomplished getting a novel created into a television series.

According to LSU, M.O. Walsh was an Ogden Honors College student. Walsh’s novel, The Big Door Prize was published in 2020. Shortly after the book was published, Walsh was given the opportunity to turn his novel into a comical series on AppleTV+.

According to IMDb, the series features major cast members such as Chris O’Dowd, Gabrielle Dennis, and Sammy Fourlas. Season one of the Big Door Prize is now available for streaming.

The novel is set in a small fictional town in Louisiana. A magical machine appears in a local grocery store. The machine is believed to show whoever uses it, their destiny. The story is centered around a married couple of 15 years but they each get different readings from the machine.

“When I was at LSU, I had an instructor named Matt Clark who was so enthusiastic and really believed that making stuff up can make people’s lives better and change the world. So, I really wanted the book to be funny, page-turning, mysterious, and helpful in a way and I think that comes through in the series as well,” Walsh explained to LSU.

Since graduating, Walsh’s stories have made appearances in the New York Times, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Oxford American, Best New American Voices, and more. Walsh serves as the director of the creative writing workshop at the University of New Orleans.