Printz-award winning author Melina Marchetta speaks to Hypable about why she won’t allow YA fantasy novel Finnikin of the Rock and the rest of The Lumatere Chronicles to be adapted as a film.

We recently spoke to Melina Marchetta about the American release of Quintana of Charyn, the final novel in her YA fantasy trilogy, The Lumatere Chronicles. As The Hunger Games, Divergent, and many upcoming films prove, studios are clamoring to adapt YA fantasy series. So why won’t Marchetta sell the rights?

I think too many fantasy novels have been ruined, especially YA ones, because they have only been given an hour and a half or two hours. There’s no way that you could convey the epicness of all three of those novels in two hours.

This is a fairly rare stand from a YA author. But just because there are no Lumatere films on the horizon, it doesn’t mean that we will never see this brilliant series on screen. Marchetta has another suggestion, saying, “I’d love it to be a TV show. I think it would be a great 10 part series for each one of them.”

So just like Game of Thrones? “I wouldn’t want it to be completely Game of Thrones, but I think that is a beautifully made series. […] I would love someone who knows what they’re doing to say, ‘We would like to do a 10 part series of Finnikin, and then Froi and Quintana,’ and it would be great if it was HBO.”

Marchetta wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of her first novel, Looking for Alibrandi. When asked if she would try her hand at penning a fantasy script, Marchetta says “My pride or my ego isn’t that massive that I would make an error and believe that I could do something better than someone else. If someone came forward and they suggested someone who could do it a lot better than I could because of the genre, I’d go with it.”

We would love to see Finnikin, Froi and Quintana on screen, but Marchetta says that she is waiting until someone with a vision comes along.

“It’s always hard to say that I would say no to a film, but I do say no to film adaptations of my work, because I think there’s so many people who want the rights for the sake of things.”

Quintana of Charyn will be released in the United States on April 23, 2013.