Scott Smith (author)

Scott Smith

Scott Bechtel Smith (born July 13, 1965) is an American author and screenwriter, who has published two novels, A Simple Plan and The Ruins. His screen adaptation of A Simple Plan earned him an Academy Award nomination. The screenplay won a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award and a National Board of Review Award.

Smith was born in Summit, New Jersey in 1965 and moved to Toledo, Ohio as a child.^[1] After studying at Dartmouth College and graduating from Columbia University, he took up writing full-time.

His second novel, The Ruins, was also adapted into a film, released on April 4, 2008. Stephen King called it "[t]he best horror novel of the new century." King had also called A Simple Plan "simply the best suspense novel of the year."

Early life

Smith is the son of Linda and Doug Smith. He told The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reviewer Regis Behe that, as a child, he read his father's "castoffs," the novels of Clive Cussler and Jack Higgins. "Growing up, I also read Ray Bradbury and Stephen King," he said. "I just had a sense of how to create these places that aren't real world places, but just with this provisional attachment to the real world. It is very much of your imagination, and I felt very much I could do that."^[2]

Bibliography

• A Simple Plan (1993), ISBN 0-312-95271-6
• The Ruins (2006), ISBN 1-4000-4387-5

Translations

• Italy by Mario Biondi, "Un piano semplice", Rizzoli, 1993
• Slovak (by Katarína Jusková): Ruiny. - Bratislava : Ikar 2006. ISBN 978-80-551-1369-2
• Sweden by Olov Hyllienmark "Ruinerna"
• Denmark by Henrik Enemark Sørensen
• Poland by Jan Kraśko - "Prosty Plan"

References

External links

• Scott B. Smith at the Internet Movie Database
• Online interview from CBC Words at Large
• New York Times Review