Film option rights for Casey Plett's debut novel Little Fish have been sold to Canadian filmmaker Louise Weard and will be adapted by independent production company Black Mansion Films.

Published in 2018 by Arsenal Pulp Press, Little Fish tells the story of Wendy Reimer, a 30-year-old transgender woman living in Winnipeg. Readers meet Wendy in a bar, eight years post-transition, conversing with three friends on the precariousness of transgender life. On Wendy's mind is a family secret freshly revealed: her Mennonite grandfather may have been transgender as well.

Little Fish won the $60,000 Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction and the Firecracker Award for fiction.

"Queer Mennonites have existed for as long as there have been Mennonites. It's probably been an internal, quiet and unwritten experience. Part of me writing Little Fish came out of thinking that if past generations who died when I was a kid or earlier were transgender, I probably would have never known," Plett told Shelagh Rogers in 2019.

Plett was born in Manitoba and has lived in Ontario, Oregon and New York. Her 2014 short story collection, A Safe Girl to Love, also won a Lambda Literary Award. Plett was awarded an Honour of Distinction from The Writers' Trust of Canada's Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ Emerging Writers. Her most recent book is the short story collection A Dream of a Woman, which was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Plett was also the jury chair for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

"I'm so thrilled that Little Fish is on its way to existing onscreen, and I couldn't be more excited to work on it with a fellow trans woman from the Prairies," Plett said in a statement.

"Since the novel's publication I've been deeply moved by readers' responses to the story of Wendy Reimer, and I can't wait to see her and her friends come alive in this medium."

Weard is a Saskatoon-born filmmaker who will produce the Little Fish adaptation with Black Mansion Films along with her producing partner, Heather Buckley.

"I am so happy to be developing Casey's novel Little Fish, a raw and authentic portrait of a trans woman that handles its material with a specificity of voice that is without precedent in the trans stories that have been brought to the screen so far," Weard said in a statement.

"Not only is this a story I connected with as a trans girl from the Canadian Prairies, but Casey's strength as a writer delivers a story that is emotionally rich; an adaptation has the power to be truly impactful in a time when trans lives have been politicized to the point of abstraction. A serious yet touching character portrait like Little Fish is exactly the type of project I want to bring to life onscreen."