Lena Dunham is set to adapt Karen Cushman's much loved 1994 children's book Catherine, Called Birdy as a feature film. The writer and actress - the brains behind HBO's Girls - confirmed the project at the New Yorker festival this week, revealing that she is working on a screenplay of the novel, set in 1290 England.

Lena DunhamLena Dunham is looing to adapt the novel 'Catherine, Called Birdy'

The book - which on the Newbery Honor and Golden Kite Award in 1995 - tells the story of a well-off baron whose daughter Catherine, a before-her-time feminist, is thirteen or fourteen years old. Much of Catherine's energy is consumed by avoiding the various suitors her father chooses for her to marry and she sends them all packing with various ruses. 

"It's hyper realistic and really pretty and it's full of incest and beatings, but it's a child's story. I've been obsessed with it since I was a kid," Dunham said at the festival in New York, via the Guardian.

"It's a really interesting examination of sort of like coming of age and what's expected of teenage girls," she said. "I'm going to adapt it and hopefully direct it, I just need to find someone who wants to fund a PG-13 medieval movie."

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Dunham should have no such trouble. Easily one of the most in-demand writers on the planet, the 28-year-old was paid an advance of $3.7 million for her memoir Not That Kind of Girl, and pulled in $304,000 from the promotional tour.

Should she secure the require funding for Catherine, Called Birdy, it would be Dunham's second movie - her first being Tiny Furniture, which won the top prize at the South by Southwest Festival in 2010. 

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