This Deadline function, now in its fourth yr, seeks to highlight the work of among the buzziest new European writers within the enterprise.
This yr’s crop comprises a former physician, journalist and moon rock lover. Collectively, they’re engaged on an eye catching array of tasks, from James Norton’s adaptation of JP Delaney’s bestselling novel Enjoying Good, to Netflix and the BBC’s retelling of the Lockerbie bombing.
Our writers share a devotion to storytelling and really feel passionately about concepts with a robust sense of place — be {that a} Welsh cave with a hidden dragon or an elite Swedish boarding college.
Scroll on for our rundown of the 5 Rising Writers to be careful for in 2024.
It was a excellent news day when Grace Ofori-Attah sat down for a chat with Deadline: her ITV sequence Malpractice had simply been renewed for a second season. “It’s clearly the dream,” she beams.
The primary season starred Niamh Algar as a physician below investigation over suspected negligence. Season 2 will function a complete new case, with one other medic below the microscope. Produced by World Productions, it’s, in essence, Line of Responsibility in a hospital.
Useful then that Ofori-Attah is a Cambridge-educated physician who practiced for almost 15 years. She’s performed shifts in emergency items and returned to the frontline through the pandemic, which means she has first-hand expertise of the NHS at its most significant.
Storytelling has all the time been amongst her first loves, nonetheless. She penned poems and quick tales for herself from a younger age, and even tried to jot down a novel concurrently learning for her medical diploma. After graduating, Ofori-Attah turned her artistic powers to a script, which she completed rapidly and located satisfying.
Ofori-Attah submitted the script to a Channel 4 writing scheme in 2016. She wasn’t profitable, however returned a yr later with a spec concerning the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and received chosen. It was a pathway to an agent and part-time writing.
The seeds for Malpractice took root at World in 2019, with the corporate serving to Ofori-Attah form an thought to inform a extra multi-faceted story concerning the medical career. “Typically what you see with docs on TV is that they’re heroic. You don’t see the opposite issues that impression their day by day lives just like the regulatory our bodies,” she explains.
Ofori-Attah has additionally not too long ago been introduced as the author of Enjoying Good, ITV’s adaptation of JP Delaney’s bestselling unintended child swap novel starring James Norton and Algar. The four-part restricted sequence is presently in manufacturing in Cornwall.
Ofori-Attah says her specialism in psychiatry has helped her construct characters and set up their motives. “Being comfy seeing issues from different views actually helps with characters and making them extra lifelike,” she says.
Within the yr forward, Ofori-Attah shall be consumed by the second season of Malpractice, however it may turn out to be more durable to disregard the telephone, which has been ringing with elevated regularity after she was named author of the yr on the Ladies in Movie & TV Awards in December.
She would love to jot down a movie and revisit the script that began all of it: Her story concerning the Notting Hill race riots. Primarily although, Ofori-Attah is simply glad to have cracked her second profession. “I really feel very lucky to have discovered a means into this business. I pinch myself that it’s my job,” she smiles.
Grace Ofori-Attah is repped by The Company.
It’s not usually as a journalist that you just stroll right into a sterile press junket and stroll out feeling that your life could have modified perpetually.
That was the expertise of Benji Walters, who had a sliding doorways encounter with Luca Guadagnino in 2016, when the feted Name Me by Your Title director was on the promotion path for A Greater Splash.
Walters had arrived to conduct a simple interview for UK life-style journal Wonderland, however was as an alternative propelled into the world of screenwriting by a captivated Guadagnino.
Recent from graduating from college, Walters engaged Guadagnino with questions on Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. The novel was each a dissertation topic for Walters and a artistic touchstone for Guadagnino through the making of A Greater Splash.
“It was a loopy second in my life when every part modified. We had interview, however then he requested if I needed to be his researcher,” he recollects. “He’s impulsive and mercurial… he’s additionally very beneficiant along with his time and expertise.”
Walters had flirted with the concept of appearing and writing from a younger age, however it was Guadagnino’s intervention that helped cement his ambitions. Six months later, Walters discovered himself working alongside the Italian on his 2018 remake of Suspiria, compiling a bible of analysis for the film from northern Italy.
He graduated to co-writer on Guadagnino’s reimagination of Brideshead Revisited in 2020. The undertaking discovered a house on the BBC and HBO, however was ultimately shelved due to its price. “Sadly, that model shouldn’t be going to see the sunshine of day, which is a superb disappointment. However in a means, it was a fantastic introduction to cinema and TV,” he says.
Brideshead proved to be Walters’ ticket to an agent and introductions to producers, resembling Mammoth Display’s Damien Timmer. It led to display screen credit on BBC sequence Noughts + Crosses and Netflix thriller Obsession.
Walters says he’s drawn to thrillers however is tight-lipped about what he’s presently growing. His subsequent credit score shall be The Leopard, Netflix’s adaptation of the Sicily-set novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The lavish sequence, stated to be within the mildew of The Crown, will premiere subsequent yr and is produced by Moonage Footage.
“There’s one thing about having somebody interact along with your work, it does propel you,” he says, giving due to Guadagnino. “It’s a present.”
Benji Walters is repped by Casarotto Ramsay.
The indicators Lisa Ambjörn, the co-creator of Netflix’s Swedish drama sequence Younger Royals, would turn out to be a screenwriter and showrunner have been all the time there.
As a toddler, she’d make up tales and inform them to household and buddies. They didn’t all the time have the specified impact: She as soon as informed a good friend that she owned a speaking rock from the moon. The good friend, a Jehovah’s Witness, thought it was Devil at work. Even so, her creativeness was her escape. “I used to be a nerd in class, so these tales have been a survival factor,” says Ambjörn.
Later in her childhood in suburban Stockholm, she joined youth theater teams, the place a scarcity of funding taught her the fundamentals of manufacturing. “We’d construct our personal levels, do our personal lighting,” she says. “Even when it wasn’t good, it was good in a way of what it means to get one thing to an viewers.”
These expertise would repay afterward, however her working life started in London, the place she labored as a documentary editor. Although she loved the artistic facets of turning uncooked footage right into a narrative, she realized she was “on the improper finish of the storytelling spectrum.”
That perception got here at a chaotic time in Ambjörn’s life. Aged 24, she was recognized with cervical most cancers throughout a routine check-up in London and underwent profitable surgical procedure. The episode supplied her with the gasoline for her acclaimed eight-part SVT comedy Sjukt (Sick), a couple of younger girl recovering from most cancers who returns dwelling to Sweden from London to search out her life falling aside.
After her most cancers, Ambjörn retrained as a scriptwriter on the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, the place she had interned in SVT’s famend drama division. Although she is by her personal admission “unhealthy at grammar and writing,” her pure storytelling items shone by means of and earlier than lengthy she was head author on the pubcaster’s nostalgic drama sequence Dreaming of England (Sommaren 85). She additionally co-wrote Sweden-Finland sci-fi sequence The White Wall.
Nonetheless, issues actually exploded in July 2021 when Netflix launched Younger Royals, the story of a fictional Swedish prince at an elite boarding college who falls in love with a fellow male scholar.
Although Ambjörn is at pains to notice she is one in every of three creators of the present, her instincts performed a big position in its success. She advised ditching a homicide plotline and specializing in themes extra essential to most modern-day youngsters, resembling queerness and private freedoms.
The Rojda Sekersöz-directed sequence attracted a large on-line following with Reddit teams discussing plotlines and characters, and Instagram and TikTok memes flooding social media. “It has been such a privilege to see how the fandom has grown,” says Ambjörn.
Her position has additionally grown, from head author within the first two seasons to showrunner for the third and closing run – placing to make use of these expertise she realized again in these theater teams. “My realization now that we’ve completed capturing is that this won’t occur once more,” she says. “It’s been such a novel expertise, however I’m additionally glad to finish it when it nonetheless feels thrilling to shoot. If we carried on, the power may begin to run out.”
So what’s subsequent? Ambjörn and her U.S. illustration, Nameless Content material, are taking out a comedy-drama with an “American story” with some “actually cool collaborators.” Early-stage analysis on a undertaking set within the UK can also be underway.
Not unhealthy for the schoolgirl from Sweden with a speaking moon rock.
As a Glasgow-based author, born on the west coast of Scotland 4 days after the occasions of December 21, 1988, Gillian Roger Park feels considerably entwined with the Lockerbie bombing.
Park is drawing on this connection as she pens episodes for one in every of two main dramas on the catastrophe going into manufacturing subsequent yr. Her sequence, Lockerbie, has landed at Netflix and the BBC, whereas Sky and Peacock are engaged on an identical undertaking that has been hit by delays.
Park considers the two-episode task to be a major duty. “The Lockerbie bombing hangs over Scottish tradition very closely. I felt the burden of that. This was a job that I actually needed to do and it’s an actual honor to be requested. It’s a valuable story,” she says. “I believe we’ll do it justice.”
Engaged on the sequence has been a departure for a author who reduce her tooth within the comedy world. Her first TV gig got here on RTÉ and BBC sequence The Younger Offenders after she wrote the quick movie, Flotsam, which was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland new expertise award.
She created Sneakerhead, the UKTV sports activities store comedy from Roughcut TV, the producer behind multi-BAFTA successful sequence Stath Lets Flats. She additionally had an uncredited position on Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5.
Park says the talents of writing drama and comedy are transferable, citing one her of heroes, Jesse Armstrong, who went from Channel 4’s cult comedy Peep Present to the worldwide HBO megahit Succession.
“With comedy, you want the story earlier than you will get to the jokes, whereas it’s fairly a bit extra susceptible writing drama since you’re simply being honest,” she says.
Park is ending her scripts for Lockerbie and is transferring over to a different World Productions undertaking: Season 2 of ITV’s chilly case detective drama Karen Pirie. She can also be growing an authentic sequence for BBC Scotland, which follows a documentary maker filming a undertaking a couple of lacking woman in a small Scottish city. The drama is housed at Firebird Footage, the BBC Studios-owned manufacturing outfit that made Amazon Prime Video thriller Wilderness.
“Scotland has so many various faces, there’s a lot that you are able to do within the nation, and I’d love to have the ability to showcase that,” Park says. Being trusted with one in every of Scotland’s most essential fashionable tales shouldn’t be a nasty begin.
Gillian Roger Park is repped by Casarotto Ramsay.
Keri Collins is not only the winner of this yr’s Brit Listing, he romped to victory with a report variety of endorsements. Tremendous Gran, his function movie remake of the favored Nineteen Eighties ITV children present, picked up 42 votes.
The story a couple of dyslexic London schoolboy who discovers his cantankerous Scottish granny has superpowers is long-gestating, with Collins now on his third or fourth iteration of the script. It was in with an unnamed streamer, however not too long ago fell out of favor, therefore the movie that includes on the Brit Listing.
The Welsh author has based mostly Tremendous Gran on his nice auntie, an “wonderful, gregarious” former jail officer, who’s now in her 80s. Discovering a baddie has been a difficulty with the movie, however Collins has alighted on a tech bro decided to result in instantaneous local weather change in a quest for revenue.
Tremendous Gran is housed at Brock Media, the manufacturing firm behind Saoirse Ronan function The Outrun, which is able to premiere at subsequent yr’s Sundance Movie Competition.
Collins has all the time liked the flicks and was raised on a eating regimen of Monty Python, which informs his style for the fantastical. His large break got here after he teamed up with Boiling Level actor Ray Panthaki to make Comfort, the 2013 British indie co-starring Adeel Akhtar and Vicky McClure.
“That movie modified every part for me and gave me a profession,” he says. “It was picked up by Netflix and gained a Welsh BAFTA. It was later throughout Covid that I actually began specializing in writing once more.”
Collins is in improvement on an eclectic array of tasks, together with Tremendous Sisters, an motion comedy a couple of superhero who trains her deadbeat sister to deputize for her whereas she takes maternity depart. The undertaking was in with a U.S. Emmy-winning producer however is now in turnaround.
He’s additionally been impressed by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s takeover of Wrexham, main him to create a movie titled The Pink Dragon. An American water govt travels to Wales to evict a historic village and construct a profit-making reservoir, however when he slips right into a cave and finds a cute child dragon, he should forsake his egocentric work and defend the beast from an historic evil king coming back from the Welsh otherworld, who needs to show the Earth right into a burning hellscape.
Collins’ Brit Listing triumph has definitely put hearth in his stomach.
Keri Collins is repped by 42 Administration.
