Announcing the Drama Room writers for 2018

We are delighted to announce the fifteen writers who will be joining this year's Drama Room Development Group, thirteen of whom came through our open submission Drama Script Room which closed back in January.

We received 3845 scripts in total in this window of which 572 made it to the second stage (30 page read), 137 made it to the full read stage (and get a script report) and 47 to double read by the BBC Writersroom Producer team.

We interviewed 35 writers to find out more about their experience, their ambitions and areas of interest but most importantly to discover the writers who are at that sweet spot in their development where being part of the Drama Room could launch them to the next stage of their career.

The overall standard of scripts was so high this year that we are determined to make sure we keep in contact with and continue to develop a further thirteen writers who nearly made it into Drama Room. Many of these writers are being taken under the wing of one of our regional Development Producers, so although we are running a Drama Room of fifteen this year, we have a wider pool of talent we have our eyes on. A huge thank you again to all of you who sent in your scripts.

The Drama Room group will run over six months, kicking off at our TV Writers' Festival next week, with a day a month of masterclasses, workshops and talks. The BBC umbrella is broad, so we will run workshops which cover Radio Drama, Childrens, TV Drama and Continuing Drama Series. These are all exciting areas of BBC programming for writers to aim at.

Alongside the Drama Room workshops, for the first time this year we are also offering six months of industry level script editing to give all the Drama Room writers the opportunity to put all their new knowledge into practice and either work on their calling-card TV 'spec' script or maybe a pilot episode for a series. Their spec' script is key as this will be the piece of writing that will open doors by demonstrating the writer's unique voice and may gain them an agent and get them into those all important Producer meetings.  With this in mind, at the end of the six months we will have a networking evening for the writers with producers from independent companies and, for those that don’t already have an agent, a chance to meet agents. 

Here's the list of writers in the Drama Room 2018:

• James Price
• Silas Parry
• Samara Maclaren
• Greer Ellison
• John O’Donovan
• Jesse Schwenk
• Joseph Charlton
• Patrick Cash
• Naomi Sheldon
• Sian Ejiwunmi-le Berre
• Eno Mfon
• Paula Ogun
• Rabiah Hussain
• Isis Davis
• Joshua Azouz