Red carpet experience for award winning York student
Posted on 26 November 2013
Rosy Deacon, who graduated from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television with a First Class Degree in July, received the Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award.
Presented by the International Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation, the award is designed to motivate non-American novice writers under the age of 30, offering them the recognition and encouragement that might lead to a successful career in television scriptwriting.
As well as being flown out to New York City, Rosy received a $2,500 prize and took part in the red carpet festivities at the International Emmy® Awards Gala. Her winning script Shards was read out by actors in front of a Festival audience.
Rosy, one of the first graduating cohort from York’s new BSc in Film and Television Production degree, developed and wrote Shards, a one-hour fantasy drama pilot, as part of a third-year individual project module on scriptwriting.
Rosy, 23, who is originally from Leeds, said: “Winning the award was absolutely amazing. The Ustinov Award is so prestigious, so I just feel very honoured and proud to have won it.”
Set in Cold War Berlin, Shards features an English secretary meeting a disgraced professor who can walk through mirrors and finds herself caught up in the search for his lost daughter.
Rosy said: “The script is heavily influenced by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland along with Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen, but setting it in Berlin in the 60s also let me add a whole Cold War, espionage element, which really let me have a lot of fun with it.
The Ustinov Award is so prestigious, so I just feel very honoured and proud to have won it
Rosy Deacon
“I learned a tremendous amount while at York and we had a fantastic screenwriting tutor, Simon van der Borgh, who was great at helping us to develop our ideas. I think we were given a strong understanding of structure and narrative, and just a really good grounding in writing overall.”
Lecturer Simon van der Borgh, from the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, said: “It is unparalleled to my knowledge for a graduating student to win such a prestigious prize for a piece of work developed as part of her degree programme.
“It was clear from early on in the process that Rosy had outstanding talent as an emerging writer. Her submission for the scriptwriting module is one of the best examples of student work that I have read in 11 years in my capacity as an international screenwriting teacher and has many of the hallmarks of the work of a professional writer.”
Rosy is currently on a three-month internship with the Knight Hall Agency in London, which represents York lecturer Simon van der Borgh (In Tranzit), as well as writers and filmmakers such as Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty), Martin McDonough (In Bruges) and Simon Nye (Men Behaving Badly).
After her internship, Rosy hopes to go into script development, working for a production company, as well as doing more writing herself.
Notes to editors:
- For more information on the 2013 Sir Peter Ustinov Television Scriptwriting Award visit www.iemmys.tv/foundation.aspx
- More information on the BSc in Film and Television Production at www.york.ac.uk/tftv/undergraduate/bsc-film-tv/
- More information on the University of York’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television at www.york.ac.uk/tftv
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