Scott B. Smith
Smith in 2006
Born	(1965-07-13) July 13, 1965 (age 59) Summit, New Jersey, U.S.
Occupation	Author screenwriter executive producer
Language	English
Education	Dartmouth College Columbia University (MFA)
Genres	Horror, thriller
Notable works	A Simple Plan (1993), The Ruins (2006)

Scott Bechtel Smith (born July 13, 1965) is an American author and screenwriter. He has written two novels, A Simple Plan (1993) and The Ruins (2006). Both were adapted into films – A Simple Plan (1998) and The Ruins (2008), respectively – based on Smith's own screenplays. He also wrote the screenplays for the films Siberia (2018) and The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019). His screenplay for A Simple Plan earned him a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

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

He 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.

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

In 2016 it was announced that TNT had greenlit a pilot for Civil, a new TV series created by Smith about a second American Civil War following a hotly contested presidential election.^[3] A TV series adaptation of William Gibson's The Peripheral was commissioned in 2018 by Amazon,^[4] with Smith as writer.^[5] Smith created the series, and served as executive producer and showrunner. Vincenzo Natali directed the show's pilot.^[6]

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

• "The Egg Man," Open City Magazine, Issue #20^[7] (2005)
• "Up in Old Vermont", originally published in Seize the Night: New Tales of Vampiric Terror (2015) by Gallery Books, edited by Christopher Golden
• "Dogs", originally published in Dark Cities (2017) by Titan Books, edited by Christopher Golden
• "Christmas in Barcelona", originally published in Hark! The Herald Angels Scream (2018) by Anchor Books, edited by Christopher Golden
• "The New Boyfriend", originally published in Ten-Word Tragedies (2019) by PS Publishing, edited by Christopher Golden & Tim Lebbon

• Italian by Mario Biondi, "Un piano semplice", Rizzoli, 1993
• Slovakian (by Katarína Jusková): Ruiny. - Bratislava: Ikar 2006. ISBN 978-80-551-1369-2
• Spanish by Jaume Subira Ciurana, "Las Ruinas", Ediciones B, Barcelona 2007. ISBN 978-84-666-3349-9
• Swedish by Olov Hyllienmark "Ruinerna"
• Danish by Henrik Enemark Sørensen
• Polish by Jan Kraśko - "Prosty Plan"
• Spanish by Rosa Corgatelli "Un plan simple"

Film

• A Simple Plan (1998)
• The Ruins (2008)
• Siberia (2018)
• The Burnt Orange Heresy (2019)

Television

• The Peripheral (2022)

• Scott Smith at IMDb
• Online interview from CBC Words at Large
• New York Times Review