This Deadline feature, now in its fourth year, seeks to spotlight the work of some of the buzziest new European writers in the business.
This year’s crop contains a former doctor, journalist and moon rock lover. Together, they are working on an eye-catching array of projects, from James Norton’s adaptation of JP Delaney’s bestselling novel Playing Nice, to Netflix and the BBC’s retelling of the Lockerbie bombing.
Our writers share a devotion to storytelling and feel passionately about ideas with a strong sense of place — be that a Welsh cave with a hidden dragon or an elite Swedish boarding school.
Scroll on for our rundown of the five Rising Writers to watch out for in 2024.
It was a good news day when Grace Ofori-Attah sat down for a chat with Deadline: her ITV series Malpractice had just been renewed for a second season. “It’s obviously the dream,” she beams.
The first season starred Niamh Algar as a doctor under investigation over suspected negligence. Season 2 will feature a whole new case, with another medic under the microscope. Produced by World Productions, it is, in essence, Line of Duty in a hospital.
Helpful then that Ofori-Attah is a Cambridge-educated doctor who practiced for nearly 15 years. She’s done shifts in emergency units and returned to the frontline during the pandemic, meaning she has first-hand experience of the NHS at its most vital.
Storytelling has always been among her first loves, however. She penned poems and short stories for herself from a young age, and even attempted to write a novel at the same time as studying for her medical degree. After graduating, Ofori-Attah turned her creative powers to a script, which she finished quickly and found satisfying.
Ofori-Attah submitted the script to a Channel 4 writing scheme in 2016. She wasn’t successful, but returned a year later with a spec about the 1958 Notting Hill race riots and got selected. It was a pathway to an agent and part-time writing.
The seeds for Malpractice took root at World in 2019, with the company helping Ofori-Attah shape an idea to tell a more multi-faceted story about the medical profession. “Often what you see with doctors on TV is they’re heroic. You don’t see the other things that impact their daily lives like the regulatory bodies,” she explains.
Ofori-Attah has also recently been announced as the writer of Playing Nice, ITV’s adaptation of JP Delaney’s bestselling accidental baby swap novel starring James Norton and Algar. The four-part limited series is currently in production in Cornwall.
Ofori-Attah says her specialism in psychiatry has helped her build characters and establish their motives. “Being comfortable seeing things from other perspectives really helps with characters and making them more realistic,” she says.
In the year ahead, Ofori-Attah will be consumed by the second season of Malpractice, but it could become harder to ignore the phone, which has been ringing with increased regularity after she was named writer of the year at the Women in Film & TV Awards in December.
She would love to write a film and revisit the script that started it all: Her story about the Notting Hill race riots. Mainly though, Ofori-Attah is just happy to have cracked her second career. “I feel very fortunate to have found a way into this industry. I pinch myself that it’s my job,” she smiles.
Grace Ofori-Attah is repped by The Agency.
It’s not often as a journalist that you walk into a sterile press junket and walk out feeling that your life may have changed forever.
That was the experience of Benji Walters, who had a sliding doors encounter with Luca Guadagnino in 2016, when the feted Call Me by Your Name director was on the promotion trail for A Bigger Splash.
Walters had arrived to conduct a straightforward interview for UK lifestyle magazine Wonderland, but was instead propelled into the world of screenwriting by a captivated Guadagnino.
Fresh from graduating from university, Walters engaged Guadagnino with questions about Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky. The novel was both a dissertation subject for Walters and a creative touchstone for Guadagnino during the making of A Bigger Splash.
“It was a crazy moment in my life when everything changed. We had a good interview, but then he asked if I wanted to be his researcher,” he recalls. “He’s impulsive and mercurial… he’s also very generous with his time and experience.”
Walters had flirted with the idea of acting and writing from a young age, but it was Guadagnino’s intervention that helped cement his ambitions. Six months later, Walters found himself working alongside the Italian on his 2018 remake of Suspiria, compiling a bible of research for the movie from northern Italy.
He graduated to co-writer on Guadagnino’s reimagination of Brideshead Revisited in 2020. The project found a home at the BBC and HBO, but was eventually shelved because of its cost. “Unfortunately, that version is not going to see the light of day, which is a great sadness. But in a way, it was a great introduction to cinema and TV,” he says.
Brideshead proved to be Walters’ ticket to an agent and introductions to producers, such as Mammoth Screen’s Damien Timmer. It led to screen credits on BBC series Noughts + Crosses and Netflix thriller Obsession.
Walters says he is drawn to thrillers but is tight-lipped about what he is currently developing. His next credit will be The Leopard, Netflix’s adaptation of the Sicily-set novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The lavish series, said to be in the mold of The Crown, will premiere next year and is produced by Moonage Pictures.
“There’s something about having someone engage with your work, it does propel you,” he says, giving thanks to Guadagnino. “It’s a gift.”
Benji Walters is repped by Casarotto Ramsay.
The signs Lisa Ambjörn, the co-creator of Netflix’s Swedish drama series Young Royals, would become a screenwriter and showrunner were always there.
As a child, she’d make up stories and tell them to family and friends. They didn’t always have the desired effect: She once told a friend that she owned a talking rock from the moon. The friend, a Jehovah’s Witness, thought it was Satan at work. Even so, her imagination was her escape. “I was a nerd in school, so those stories were a survival thing,” says Ambjörn.
Later in her childhood in suburban Stockholm, she joined youth theater groups, where a lack of funding taught her the basics of production. “We’d build our own stages, do our own lighting,” she says. “Even if it wasn’t perfect, it was good in a sense of what it means to get something to an audience.”
Those skills would pay off later on, but her working life began in London, where she worked as a documentary editor. Though she enjoyed the creative aspects of turning raw footage into a narrative, she realized she was “at the wrong end of the storytelling spectrum.”
That insight came at a chaotic time in Ambjörn’s life. Aged 24, she was diagnosed with cervical cancer during a routine check-up in London and underwent successful surgery. The episode provided her with the fuel for her acclaimed eight-part SVT comedy Sjukt (Sick), about a young woman recovering from cancer who returns home to Sweden from London to find her life falling apart.
After her cancer, Ambjörn retrained as a scriptwriter at the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she had interned in SVT’s renowned drama division. Though she is by her own admission “bad at grammar and writing,” her natural storytelling gifts shone through and before long she was head writer on the pubcaster’s nostalgic drama series Dreaming of England (Sommaren 85). She also co-wrote Sweden-Finland sci-fi series The White Wall.
However, things really exploded in July 2021 when Netflix launched Young Royals, the story of a fictional Swedish prince at an elite boarding school who falls in love with a fellow male student.
Though Ambjörn is at pains to note she is one of three creators of the show, her instincts played a large role in its success. She suggested ditching a murder plotline and focusing on themes more important to most modern-day teenagers, such as queerness and personal freedoms.
The Rojda Sekersöz-directed series attracted a massive online following with Reddit groups 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 role has also grown, from head writer in the first two seasons to showrunner for the third and final run – putting to use those skills she learned back in those theater groups. “My realization now that we’ve finished shooting is this might not happen again,” she says. “It’s been such a unique experience, but I’m also happy to end it when it still feels exciting to shoot. If we carried on, the energy might start to run out.”
So what’s next? Ambjörn and her U.S. representation, Anonymous Content, are taking out a comedy-drama with an “American story” with some “really cool collaborators.” Early-stage research on a project set in the UK is also underway.
Not bad for the schoolgirl from Sweden with a talking moon rock.
As a Glasgow-based writer, born on the west coast of Scotland four days after the events of December 21, 1988, Gillian Roger Park feels somewhat entwined with the Lockerbie bombing.
Park is drawing on this connection as she pens episodes for one of two major dramas on the disaster going into production next year. Her series, Lockerbie, has landed at Netflix and the BBC, while Sky and Peacock are working on a similar project that has been hit by delays.
Park considers the two-episode assignment to be a significant responsibility. “The Lockerbie bombing hangs over Scottish culture very heavily. I felt the weight of that. This was a job that I really wanted to do and it’s a real honor to be asked. It’s a precious story,” she says. “I think we will do it justice.”
Working on the series has been a departure for a writer who cut her teeth in the comedy world. Her first TV gig came on RTÉ and BBC series The Young Offenders after she wrote the short film, Flotsam, which was nominated for a BAFTA Scotland new talent award.
She created Sneakerhead, the UKTV sports shop comedy from Roughcut TV, the producer behind multi-BAFTA winning series Stath Lets Flats. She also had an uncredited role on Armando Iannucci’s Avenue 5.
Park says the skills of writing drama and comedy are transferable, citing one her of heroes, Jesse Armstrong, who went from Channel 4’s cult comedy Peep Show to the global HBO megahit Succession.
“With comedy, you need the story before you can get to the jokes, whereas it’s quite a bit more vulnerable writing drama because you’re just being sincere,” she says.
Park is finishing her scripts for Lockerbie and is moving over to another World Productions project: Season 2 of ITV’s cold case detective drama Karen Pirie. She is also developing an original series for BBC Scotland, which follows a documentary maker filming a project about a missing girl in a small Scottish town. The drama is housed at Firebird Pictures, the BBC Studios-owned production outfit that made Amazon Prime Video thriller Wilderness.
“Scotland has so many different faces, there’s so much that you can do in the country, and I would love to be able to showcase that,” Park says. Being trusted with one of Scotland’s most important modern stories is not a bad start.
Gillian Roger Park is repped by Casarotto Ramsay.
Keri Collins is not just the winner of this year’s Brit List, he romped to victory with a record number of endorsements. Super Gran, his feature film remake of the popular 1980s ITV kids show, picked up 42 votes.
The story about a 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, but recently fell out of favor, hence the film featuring on the Brit List.
The Welsh writer has based Super Gran on his great auntie, an “amazing, gregarious” former prison officer, who is now in her 80s. Finding a baddie has been an issue with the film, but Collins has alighted on a tech bro determined to bring about instant climate change in a quest for profit.
Super Gran is housed at Brock Media, the production company behind Saoirse Ronan feature The Outrun, which will premiere at next year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Collins has always loved the movies and was raised on a diet of Monty Python, which informs his taste for the fantastical. His big break came after he teamed up with Boiling Point actor Ray Panthaki to make Convenience, the 2013 British indie co-starring Adeel Akhtar and Vicky McClure.
“That film changed everything for me and gave me a career,” he says. “It was picked up by Netflix and won a Welsh BAFTA. It was later during Covid that I really started focusing on writing again.”
Collins is in development on an eclectic array of projects, including Super Sisters, an action comedy about a superhero who trains her deadbeat sister to deputize for her while she takes maternity leave. The project was in with a U.S. Emmy-winning producer but is now in turnaround.
He’s also been inspired by Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s takeover of Wrexham, leading him to create a film titled The Red Dragon. An American water executive travels to Wales to evict a historic village and build a profit-making reservoir, but when he slips into a cave and finds a cute baby dragon, he must forsake his selfish work and protect the beast from an ancient evil king returning from the Welsh otherworld, who wants to turn the Earth into a burning hellscape.
Collins’ Brit List triumph has certainly put fire in his belly.
Keri Collins is repped by 42 Management.
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