Vijay Fitzgerald ScreenCraft Grand Prizewinner

Vijay Fitzgerald, UL Creative Writing MA graduate has just been announced as the GRAND PRIZEWINNER of the Internationally Prestigious Screen Craft Short Story Competition.

We are excited to announce the winners of the 2019 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story competition. Selected from roughly 1,200 submissions, What Love Does by Vijay Fitzgerald has been named the winner and The Third Obituary of Anton Popov by Jessica Walker has been named the runner-up.

In What Love Does,  following an incident at school, a young girl is sent to work as a caregiver to help support her family during a trying time in their country. When she discovers a secret her father has kept, the power dynamic in her family shifts.

In The Third Obituary of Anton Popov, an elderly homewrecker and professional obituary writer, Elise, writes three different obituaries for a famous composer, forming a relationship with his widow and his lover along the way.

The following projects have also been selected for special consideration:

Into the DustlightLisa Pais

MaltaCharles Duffie

Mother of PearlLaura Sciortino

Oakland Mothers, Oakland WivesCorey Quinlan Taylor

TendrilsBen Howling

Three Things I’ll Never Do Before I DieChristine Daigle

Two GravesZoe Kalo

Weeping WillowsDaniel Tierney

In addition to the ScreenCraft Team, the judges included: Heidi Pitlor, former senior editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Eleanor Chandler, an editor at Granta Magazine, Kirsten Reach is Fiction Editor at the Kenyon Review, Ottessa Moshfegh, a short story writer and winner of an O. Henry Award, Eileen Talone, the Assistant Editor at The Hudson Review, and Elizabeth DeMeo the Assistant Editor at Tin House Book.

Both the Grand Prize winner, Fitzgerald, and runner-up, Walker, will each receive cash prizes and have their material circulated to ScreenCraft’s network of agents, managers, and producers.

If you’d like to receive a notification when this contest re-opens for entries in 2020, you can subscribe for updates via Coverfly here.