Biography
Dr Chris Neilan is an award-winning author, screenwriter and filmmaker with a PhD in creative writing from Manchester Metropolitan University focused on unconventional narrative structures. He was shortlisted for the 2016 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the 2021 Sundance Development Track, and his films have played at 16 international film festivals and won several awards. He was awarded 2nd place for Short Fiction in the 2017 Bridport Prize, shortlisted for the 2020 Aurora Prize and the 2021 Bridport Prize, and nominated for the 2021 Pushcart Prize, the 2021 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2021 & 2022 Best Small Fictions anthology. His hybrid novel, Stellify, was published by Broken Sleep Books in Jan 2022.
His production company, Gor Gai Films, specializes in humanitarian documentaries. Past films have focused on issues affecting ethnic minorities and refugees in Burma and Thailand, including the 25min documentary Welcome to Thoo Mweh Khee which screened at the 2021 Manchester International Film Festival and won Best Documentary at the 2021 Demetera International Film Festival in Paris, amongst other festival selections and awards, and was picked up for international distribution by Journeyman Pictures. He is currently at work on feature projects, both documentary and narrative, in the UK and US. He has forthcoming academic writing in the Journal of Screenwriting and The Bloomsbury Handbook of International Screenwriting Theory, and is developing his own screenwriting handbook for Bloomsbury based on his PhD thesis. He has presented on screenwriting at international conferences in the UK, Oslo and Vienna. He created and co-hosts the podcast Two Minute Stories with poet-novelist Helen Mort and poet Mark Pajak, and is a former writer-in-residence for New Writing North.