Writers’ Guild Awards 2010 – shortlists announced

The Writers’ Guild has announced the shortlists for its annual awards, with nominations in 14 categories. The winners will be announced at a reception on Sunday 21 November 2010.

The Guild awards, dating from 1961, are cherished accolades as they are the only ones in which writers are honoured by their peers. Recipients of special or lifetime awards over the years have included Lord (Ted) Willis, John Osborne, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, Dennis Potter and Alan Plater.

Here are the shortlists in full:

Best Original Screenplay

• Kick-Ass - Jane Goldman, Matthew Vaughn
• Looking For Eric - Paul Laverty
• Four Lions - Chris Morris, Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Simon Blackwell

Best First Feature-Length Screenplay

• The Hide - Tim Whitnall
• Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - Paul Viragh
• Moon - Duncan Jones, Nathan Parker

Best Television Drama Series

• Doctor Who - Steven Moffat, Toby Whithouse, Simon Nye, Mark Gatiss, Chris Chibnall
• Being Human - Toby Whithouse
• Ashes To Ashes - Ashley Pharoah, Matthew Graham, Julie Rutterford, Tom Butterworth, Chris Hurford, Jack Lothian, James Payne
  

Best Television Comedy/ Light Entertainment

• The Thick Of It - Armando Iannucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, Ian Martin, Sean Gray, Will Smith Roger Drew
• Peep Show - Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Simon Blackwell
• Getting On - Jo Brand, Joanna Scanlan, Vicki Pepperdine

Best Television Short-Form Drama

• Small Island - Paula Milne, Sarah Williams
• Occupation - Peter Bowker
• Five Daughters - Stephen Butchard

Best Television Continuing Drama

• Coronation Street - Peter Whalley, Carmel Morgan, David Lane, Mark Wadlow, Chris Fewtrell, Jayne Hollinson, Martin Allen, Lucy Gannon, Mark Burt, John Kerr, Damon Rochefort, Julie Jones, Jonathan Harvey, Simon Crowther, Joe Turner, Debbie Oates, Daran Little, Stephen Russell, Jan McVerry
• Holby City - Tony McHale, Dana Fainaru, Martha Hillier, Chris Murray, David Lawrence, Justin Young, Veronica Henry, Peter Lloyd, Joe Ainsworth, Abi Bown, Andrew Holden, Ian Kershaw, Graham Mitchell, Sebastian Baczkiewicz, Rob Williams, Al Smith, Claire Bennett, Jake Riddell, Nick Warburton, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Rebecca Wojciechowski, Tom Bidwell, Dan Sefton, Mark Catley, Paul Mari, Nick Fisher, Sally Abbott
• Casualty - Jason Sutton, Fiona Evans, Suzie Smith, Sasha Hails, Gert Thomas, Justin Young, Martin Jameson, Michael Levine, Paul Logue, Daisy Coulam, Mark Catley, Dana Fainaru, Tom Bidwell, Karen Laws, Rachel Flowerday, Ellen Taylor, Sally Tatchell, Abi Bown, Paul Mari, Jeff Povey, Mark Cairns, Sally Abbott, Rob Williams, Stephen Keyworth, David Bowker, Deborah Jones, Sonali Bhattacharyya, Richard Monks

Best Children’s Television Drama/Comedy - live action or animation

• Shaun the Sheep - Richard Goleszowski, Rob Dudley, Glenn Dakin, Lucy Daniel Raby, Elly Brewer, Jimmy Hibbert, Will MacLean, John Camm, Lee Pressman, Julie Jones, Dan Berlinka, Andy Williams, David Ingham, Richard Vincent, Patrick Makin, Chris Sadler, Kieron Self, Giles New, James Henry, Nick Park, Kay Stonham, Sarah Ball, Ian Carney, Mark Daydy, Craig Ferguson, Patrick Gallagher
• Horrible Histories - Giles Pilbrow, Dave Cohen, Stephen Punt, Laurence Rickard,Ben Ward, Jon Holmes
• Tracy Beaker Returns - Emma Reeves, Jonathan Evans, Steven Turner, Elly Brewer, Jonathan Wolfman, Ben Ward

Best Theatre Play

• Jerusalem - Jez Butterworth
• Enron - Lucy Prebble
• Dunsinane - David Greig

Best Play for Children and Young People

• The Monster Under The Bed - Kevin Dyer
• Time For The Good Looking Boy - Michael Wicherek
• The Scarecrow - Mike Kenny

Best Radio Drama

• Wake - Katie Hims
• Number 10 - Jonathan Myerson
• Bad Faith - Peter Jukes

Best Radio Comedy/Light Entertainment

• Party - Tom Basden
• Cabin Pressure - John Finnemore
• Mark Steel’s In Town - Mark Steel

Best Videogame Script

• Red Dead Redemption - Dan Houser, Mike Unsworth
• Risen - Andrew S. Walsh, Rhianna Pratchett, James Leach
• Batman: Arkham Asylum - Paul Crocker

Best Non-Fiction Book

• Beauty And Atrocity - Joshua Levine
• A Crisis Of Brilliance - David Boyd Haycock
• This Party’s Got To Stop - Rupert Thomson

Best Fiction Book

• Corrag - Susan Fletcher
• The Spider Truces - Tom Connolly
• A Life Apart - Neel Mukherjee

David Edgar's tribute to Andrew Davies

At the Writers' Guild Awards on Sunday, Guild President, David Edgar, presented the Lifetime Achievement Award to Andrew Davies.

Here's a copy of the speech David gave in tribute.

This year's Lifetime Achievement Award goes to a writer who understands television. Although he's written novels, films and stage plays (for adults and children) he's always known that television is, essentially and uniquely, a meeting place of different forms of expression, a site in which hybridity - genre talking unto genre - is not a problem nor a compromise but the essence of the game.

As a result he took an old, perhaps rather dusty and seemingly outmoded television form and reinvented it so definitively that no one will be able to talk about it in the future without mentioning his name.

His television writing began conventionally enough, with one-off plays and comedy serials. Even then, he understood cross-fertilization. He took the prose fiction form of the campus novel and melded it with the television form of the medical soap opera to create a campus comedy set in a university health centre. A Very Peculiar Practice ran for several series in the mid 80s and it's baffling why it isn't still running now.

In the early 90s he turned to the television form he was to dominate, making the first of three adaptations of Michael Dobbs's political novels about the oily Machiavellian chief whip Francis Urquart, achieving a perfect match between an innovative writerly idea, brilliant direction and Ian Richardson's definitive performance.

In the mid-90s, there was good news and bad news. The bad news – some felt – was that the BBC decided to reinvent the classic novel adaptation, which for many of us was a blessed, Sunday afternoon childhood memory, which we hoped would stay that way.

The good news was that they decided to ask Andrew Davies to do the reinventing.

With Middlemarch, Pride and Prejudice, Moll Flanders, The Way We Live Now, Sense And Sensibility and many others, Andrew turned an old, fly-blown schedule-filler into a cutting-edge television drama flagship.

He's widely known for his observation that, as the species was propagated in the nineteenth century, the Victorians clearly had sex, and that fact this might be covertly present in the novels of the period. He is thus responsible for Colin Firth's torso and a thousand heaving bosoms on both side of the screen.

What his adaptations have in common is that they transform the source material, and, by exploiting the opportunities of television, they reinvent the dramatisation form. As someone who knows the challenges of adapting Dickens novels, I'd point particularly to the justly feted and awarded serial adaptations of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, which combined the teeming, multi-plotted character of Dickens' storytelling with the energy and drive of contemporary soap opera, to create something which is, truly, how Dickens would have wanted to write today.

Andrew has continued to adapt twentieth century novels – wonderfully, The Old Devils, Tipping the Velvet and The Line of Beauty – and to write original drama. A personal favourite was his brilliant conceit to imagine a torrid love affair between two jurors in the 1960 Lady Chatterley trial, trying out in the evening what they'd heard about in the courtroom during the day. He is notably generous to his collaborators – speaking well of script editors and producers, neither of whom always get a good press from writers. He speaks to students with wit and grace, and, last year, was the entertainment at the West Midlands Writers' Guild Christmas thrash.

It's possible to argue that Andrew's principle writing form has got out of hand. Do we need another adaptation of Emma ever, ever again? But there is of course one caveat to that. If Andrew returned to Emma, or any of the novels he's adapted, or any of the few still lurking in the further reaches of the canon which he hasn't got round to yet, he would make them feel as fresh as Northanger Abbey or Vanity Fair. He would once again have re-minted them for their medium and for their moment, and made them new.

Writers' Guild Awards

The winners of the 2009 Writers' Guild of Great Britain Awards were announced earlier this evening at an event in at the Freeword Centre in London.

Photos by Simon Denton for WGGB.

The winners were:

Television comedy / light entertainment: Outnumbered, by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton

Television drama series: Being Human, by Toby Whithouse

Television soap / continuing series: Coronation Street, episodes written by Carmel Morgan, Chris Fewtrell, Damon Rochefort, David Bowker, David Lane , Debbie Oates, Jan McVerry, Jayne Hollinson, Joe Turner, John Kerr, Jonathan Harvey, Julie Jones, Lucy Gannon, Mark Burt, Mark Wadlow, Martin Allen , Martin Sterling, Peter Whalley, Simon Crowther, Stephen Bennett (Pictured: Chris Fewtrell, Simon Crowther, Mark Wadlow, Joe Turner, Jan McVerry, Jonathan Harvey)

Television short form drama: Criminal Justice by Peter Moffat

Feature film screenplay: Hunger, by Steve McQueen and Enda Walsh

Feature film screenplay newcomer: Shifty, by Eran Creevy

Theatre play: At the Gates of Gaza, by Juliet Gilkes Romero

Theatre play for children and young people: Scarlet Ribbons, by Brendan Murray

Radio comedy / light entertainment: 15 Minute Musicals, by Dave Cohen, Richie Webb and David Quantick and

Radio drama: The Gunshot Wedding, by Katie Hims

Video games: Prince of Persia, by Andrew S Walsh

Outstanding contribution to children's writing: Sir Terry Pratchett

Lifetime achievement: Andrew Davies

Update: Here's a report on the Awards from BBC News.