Announcing the 2018 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story Competition Winners

We are excited to announce the winners of the 2018 ScreenCraft Cinematic Short Story competition. Selected from roughly 1,200 submissions, Panopticon by Kevin Kneupper has been named the winner and Waiting for the Big One by Catherine Shorr has been named the runner-up.

In Panopticon, a prisoner sentenced to a hundred years in a virtual reality prison as he gets the opportunity to escape—at the expense of his sanity. The original concept and elevation of the science fiction genre impressed judges, along with the tense conflict always pressing the plot and reader onward.

Waiting for the Big One follows Kate, an up and coming food critic for the LA Times, as she faces harsh realities of love, friendship, and inevitably natural disasters in 1980s Los Angeles. Driven by its strong central character, the judges were impressed with the confident and unique voice of the storyteller.

One Star by Tim O'Leary, Swamp Girl by Ruth Knafo Setton, and The Caregiver by J Gourley also finished in the top 5. All top 5 finalists have the option to have their stories published for a limited time on our website and shared with ScreenCraft's network.

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, and Dina Nayeri, a novelist and short story writer whose works have been selected for the O. Henry Award and Best American Short Stories of 2018 by The Southern Review.

Both the Grand Prize winner, Kneupper, and runner-up, Shorr, 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 2019, you can subscribe for updates via Coverfly here.

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