Jennifer Shaftoe

I am a third-year Cambridge student studying English at Gonville and Caius college with intentions to pursue a future career in film and television. I’m an avid reader and have been since a young age, consuming anything from Dostoevsky and Bulgakov to Sophocles and Witi Ihimaera. My pursuit of English at a high academic level has opened many doors also into my dual passion for film and TV, especially for close-analysing films and scripts. Whenever I finish a book, I immediately turn toward film, searching to see if anybody has directed a film inspired by or adapted from text, as I’m always interested to see how others read, or interpret text differently from how I read or interpreted it. I must have watched the 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice starring Keira Knightley almost as many times as I have read the book. My interests are not always literary, though they often are. My favourite TV show is Bryan Fuller’s ‘Hannibal’, an adaptation of the crime novel series by Thomas Harris, beautiful for its allusion to Dante’s Inferno, Faustus, and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the duomo in Florence. Alongside film, I enjoy any creative fields with hobbies including oil painting, vi