Jonny King, who lives in Plymouth, Devon, was announced as the TV series category winner and the overall Screenplay Award winner in the Page Turner Awards. This was announced at a glittering online ceremony, where Paul Michael Glaser, from Starsky and Hutch fame, was a special guest to announce the winners.
The Page Turner Awards, sponsored by ProWritingAid and Campfire, offers authors, writers, and screenwriters the chance to enter the first 10 pages of their writing project, where a judging panel of literary experts and film producers will read the work.
King has always been interested in writing and started pursuing comedy writing in 2015. His comedy feature screenplay 'Land's End' won the 2019 Shore Scripts Feature Screenplay Contest and was subsequently optioned and is now in development.
His comedy, Gifted, is a television series about Holly, a working class, single mum, still coming to terms with the recent death of her husband. She finds her values and beliefs tested when her wealthy but hostile parents-in-law insist on paying for her young son to attend an exclusive private school, thrusting her into the ridiculous and brutal world of the British public school system.
King was inspired to write this story after talking to a person from a working class background whose son attended a fee-paying school for a year and hearing about some of the ridiculous situations that they encountered. It made him wonder about how unusual the private education system is and whether it's rituals, traditions and values were still relevant today.
King started screenwriting without any formal training or education but taught himself from books and websites in his spare time, gradually building up an understanding of the craft and making his own industry contacts from scratch. He works hard at evenings and weekends to maintain his writing career in conjunction with his day job and plans to become a professional screenwriter within the next five years.
King said: “Thanks to Page Turner Awards, I have signed with Sean Dubravac from Entertainment Lab to take Gifted to the next level and pitch it to industry execs that I would otherwise never be able to get a meeting with. I'm incredibly excited about what the future holds and extremely grateful to everyone at Page Turner for making this possible.”
After the announcement that he was the overall Screenplay Award winner, King said, ‘I can only assume this is a mistake!”
This year aspiring writers walked off the red carpet with life-changing prizes. One new unpublished writer won literary agency representation while a screenwriter won literary management. Another new writer won a publishing deal, seven independent authors won an audiobook production from Spectrum Audiobooks, plus one other won a publishing package (including an edit, book cover and book trailer), and another author won a book adaptation.
The Page Turner Awards winners can be found here: https://pageturnerawards.com/2021-winners
Submissions for the 2022 Awards will open in January 2022. Find out how you too can enter your writing into The Page Turner Awards: https://pageturnerawards.com
