The screenwriter of “The Good Lie,” the Reese Witherspoon film telling the story of a woman who assists four Sudanese refugees who relocate to the United States, will be honored by the Writers Guild of America for shining a light on constitutional and civil rights issues, the guild announced today.
Margaret Nagle will receive the guild’s Paul Selvin Award during the WGA Awards ceremony Feb. 14. The award honors a writer whose script “embodies the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere.”
“Margaret Nagle’s script for ‘The Good Lie’ raises profound issues of resilience and survival in the face of unspeakable atrocities,” WGA, West President Christopher Keyser said. “The struggles of the Lost Boys of Sudan in her film remind us how desperately all human beings strive for freedom.
“But what makes Nagle’s screenplay particularly heart-wrenching is that the civil war in Sudan was a humanitarian crisis of epic proportion, and yet many people were not even aware of it,” Keyser said. “In shining a light on the Lost Boys, Nagle illuminates their struggle for freedom and the paradoxical complexity of adjusting to it in the foreign culture of America.”
Nagle said she was “moved” by the WGA honor. She said working on the script “brought me face to face with the very highest and lowest parts of the human spirit, as well as the remarkable humanitarian organizations who risk their lives on a daily basis, and the Lost Boys and Girls themselves, who I am honored to call my friends.”
Nagle has also worked as a writer/producer on HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” and wrote the pilot for Fox’s “Red Band Society.”
Previous winners of the Selvin Award include Dustin Lance Black, Tony Kushner, Michael Mann and Alex Gibney.
