Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch to be adapted into film after Warner Bros 'buys rights'

The movie adaptation will be co-produced by director Brett Ratner

Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch is being adapted to the silver screen (Getty)

Putlitzer Prize-winning fictional novel The Goldfinch, written by American author Donna Tartt, is being adapted for the big screen.

Warner Bros has reportedly bought the film rights, while RatPac Entertainment will produce it with the help of Hunger Games producer Nina Jacobson, her colleague Brad Simpson and with Rush Hour director Brett Ratner also co-producing.

The Goldfinch, which won the coveted Pulitzer award for fiction in April this year, is Tartt’s third novel.

It follows the story of 13-year-old Theo, who has an absent father and then loses his mother in an accident he survives.

He steals a painting – that of Dutch painter Carel Fabritius’ 1654 The Goldfinch – and spends the subsequent two decades enthralled by its mystery while being drawn into the antiques world and the high life of criminal enterprise.

(Little Brown)

Tartt’s The Goldfinch was critically acclaimed upon its release, 12 years after her last book, and it has spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

It becomes the second book by Tartt to have its movie rights acquired by Warner Bros – a number of years ago the studio bought her debut novel The Secret History (1992).

Her other book, The Little Friend, was published in 2002 and has also been translated into 30 languages.

Mississippi-born Tartt was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people earlier this year and the tireless worker has previously stated: “If I’m not working, I’m not happy.”

She said in a Telegraph interview in December: “So many people say to me, why don’t you write books faster? And I’ve tried to, just to see if I could.

“But working that way doesn’t come naturally to me. I would be miserable cranking out a book every three or four years. And if I’m not having fun writing it, people aren’t going to have fun reading it.

“I don’t want it to be just some little amusement-park ride. I mean, what’s the point of doing that?”

The Goldfinch was expected to be a shoo-in for this year's Man Booker, but much to the surprise of pundits was left off the longlist announced last week.