Semifinalist, 45 Forward Screenwriting Fellowship (2026)
Semifinalist, 2026/2027 Top Tier Competition
BIO
Sarah Grochala is a British-Polish neurodiverse writer based in LA. Her stories centre intelligent, difficult and morally complex neurodiverse women fighting to live fully-realised lives.
Sarah is an alumna of Channel 4's 4Screenwriting program and a HRTS Foundation Fellow. Her historical TV drama pilot THE TRIALS, based on the true stories of women caught up in the Scottish witch hunts, recently won ISA's Fast Track Fellowship. Other accolades include semifinalist placements at the Austin Film Festival, The Writers Lab and Roadmap's Top Tier Competition for her TV drama pilot VINDICATION about the scandalous eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her coming-of-age feature UNCLE ANDRZEJ, which tells the story of how an aging Polish resistance fighter helps a British girl battle a gang of vicious bullies, placed as a semifinalist for Humanitas's Carol Mendelsohn College Drama Award.
Awards for Sarah's theatre work include the Women's Prize for Playwriting for INTELLIGENCE. INTELLIGENCE examines gender bias in AI through the life of the computing pioneer Ada Lovelace and is in development with Paines Plough. Her first play S-27, a dystopian drama about a female revolutionary tasked with photographing prisoners before their execution, won the Amnesty International Protect the Human Playwriting Award and has been produced in the UK, Australia and Canada. Sarah recently produced and directed S-27 on the Hollywood Fringe winning the Loud Karma Emerging Women & Gender-Diverse Playwrights Award.
Sarah regularly writes podcast episodes of DR WHO for Big Finish, where she specialises in stories featuring alien invasions in historical settings and robots, and sometimes both.