DW Ardern

Fiction writer, humorist, screenwriter

Brooklyn, New York

Member Since:
March 2023

Last online:
> 2 weeks ago

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About DW

DW Ardern is a fiction writer and screenwriter living in Brooklyn NY. His feature script Paper Birds was a semi-finalist in the Emerging Screenwriters Genre-Busting Screenplay competition and he was the runner-up for the Nancy D. Hard Grove Editor’s Prize in Fiction in 2021. His stories have appeared in The Fourth River, Stanchion, Quagmire Literary Journal, Jabberwock Review, Oyster River Pages, Vestal Review, Fictive Dream, The Offbeat, Popular Science, NBC News, and Conde Nast Traveler among others. He's currently shopping a literary suspense novel L.X.P., a novella/short story collection, and various feature / TV series scripts.

DW began his career as a small-town New England reporter, covering rural life in the Maine woods. For the past fifteen years, he has worked in the NYC media industry as a freelance writer, travel editor for Conde Nast, creative director, speechwriter, as well as various production roles in film & television. He received an MFA in Fiction & Screenwriting from Queens University of Charlotte.

Gender:
Male

Certifications

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Loglines

Paper Birds Budget: $1M - $5M | Comedy A young neuroscientist, numbed out in the rat race of New York City, unexpectedly receives a series of notebooks that once belonged to a childhood friend whose suicide remains a mystery. The bizarre short stories in these notebooks (sci-fi, fantasy, noir) open up a world of wild imagination, danger, and intrigue, revealing clues about what really happened to his friend. As he starts to rediscover his excitement for life and adventure through these stories, his sense of wonder is reignited, blending the real with the surreal and setting him on a path of self-discovery and possibly self-destruction.
Siblings Budget: $100K - $1M | Comedy "Siblings" is an odd-couple comedy TV series set in New York about siblings—an anxiety-riddled aspiring novelist KIRAN (early 30s, white) and his wild younger sister JADE (late 20s, Indian-American) who barrels into his quiet literary life like a punk-rock wrecking ball. While the heart of the show is about their friendship, it’s also a satire on our identity-obsessed culture viewed through the New York literary scene, exploring the themes of identity, ambition, belonging, acceptance, and ultimately family.

Awards

Emerging Screenwriters Comedy Genre-Busting Screenplay - Semi-Finalist
(2021)

Education

Queens University of Charlotte
(2020-2022)