18 December 2010

Susan Shemtob wins best screenplay award


Susan Shemtob (above right) won the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Award for Best Screenplay 2010. She received her prize from William Ivory (above left) at the Graham Greene International Festival 2010, when a packed auditorium gave Susan a warm reception.

She wrote a lively screenplay in which she presented the funeral of a young man and other moments from present time, which were interwoven with past time and a violent murder on a railway train. Her text showed a keen appreciation of how the medium of screenplay (as opposed to a stage play) might work in images and cuts, as well as in dialogue and action.

All screenplays in the competition had to embed the following line in their work: “A whistle blew, and the train trembled into movement”, and the award-winning texts were displayed in the Exhibition in Deans' Hall, Berkhamsted School (Hertfordshire, UK), on Saturday 2nd and Sunday 3rd October 2010.

The other winners of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s inaugural Creative Writing Awards 2010 were Cathy Hogan (best fiction), Rebecca Barrow (best writer under 21 years), Sid Sagar (best Berkhamstedian) and Anne Chinneck (best Old Berkhamstedian).

The prizes were presented by William Ivory, who wrote the screenplay for the popular film Made in Dagenham (UK, 2010), and the psychoanalyst and former England cricket captain, Michael Brearley, OBE.

The closing date for submission of texts for the next round of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust’s Creative Writing Awards is 1st April 2011. Full details of the competitions are available on the Trust’s website, from which you can also download a pdf file with the complete rules.

No comments:

Post a Comment