Michael Haneke has become the latest high-profile film director to turn his hand to the small screen after revealing he is working on a 10-part English language TV series.

The Austrian director, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and best foreign language Oscar in 2012 for his film Amour, confirmed he is working on Kelvin’s Book, a dystopian story set in the near future.

Haneke, who is one of contemporary cinema’s most celebrated auteurs and is well known for his unsparingly grim thrillers such as Funny Games, The Piano Teacher and Caché, said the move gave him the opportunity to work in a longer format.

“After 10 TV movies and 12 films, I wanted to tell a longer story for once,” said Haneke. Kelvin’s Book will be shot in English, confirmed German production company UFA, which was behind Deutschland 83, the German-language Stasi thriller that was one of the Guardian’s top TV shows of 2016.

“No contemporary director has moved and inspired me more than Michael Haneke,” said the UFA chief executive, Nico Hofmann. “Kelvin’s Book is an extraordinarily rich, gripping and ambitious story. With contemporary themes and a reflection of the digital age that we live in, there’s no better time for this project.”

Kelvin’s Book sounds like it will be a very different prospect to Haneke’s recent work. His latest film, Happy End, focuses on a bourgeois family in Calais who have a desensitised world view that means they are unconcerned by the refugee crisis on their doorstep.

The 75-year-old’s most-awarded film, Amour, was a delicate portrait of an elderly French couple who come to terms with their own mortality. Little is known about Kelvin’s Book beyond its near future dystopian setting and that it will involved a group of young people who are trying to survive in an uncompromising world.

Haneke joins a long list of directors who have transferred from cinema to television. Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It), Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young), the Coen brothers (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and Italian film-maker Paolo Sorrentino (The Young Pope) have all teamed up with Netflix, HBO, Sky and Amazon to produce ambitious TV projects.

Kelvin’s Book is not in production yet and doesn’t have a broadcast or streaming partner.