2021 Miskatonic Scholarship Winners

Erina Lee and Mars Hawthorne are the 2021 winners of George R. R. Martin’s Miskatonic Scholarship, which supports a promising new writer of Lovecraftian cosmic horror attending the Odyssey Writing Workshop. This year, due to the special circumstances and difficulties created by the COVID-19 pandemic, Martin decided to award the Miskatonic Scholarship to two writers

Martin discovered the work of H. P. Lovecraft when he was a boy and found that no other writer could give him “chills to equal those provided by the cosmic horrors that Lovecraft evoked.” With the scholarship, Martin hopes to encourage and inspire a new generation of writers to explore the genre of cosmic horror.

Erina Lee

Erina Lee is a rising junior at Davidson College and the recipient of the Patricia Cornwell Creative Writing Scholarship. Her favorite character archetype is the mysterious informant.

Lee’s winning story, “Heliolatry,” tells the story of a group of astronomers trying to discover the cause when everyone on Earth starts to hear the sun screaming. Of her inspiration for the story, Lee said, “I wanted to write a story in which the moon was an egg about to hatch. After a single Google search, though, I found that Doctor Who had been there, done that. So I settled for the Sun.”

Mars Hawthorne

Mars Hawthorne is a writer of dark fiction, psychotherapist, and film buff based in Portland, Oregon. Her passion for storytelling began in kindergarten when she informed her teacher that, during nap-time, she’d witnessed a monster eat the little girl next to her and then spit out her bones.

She is a member of the Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers and a Supporting Member of the Horror Writer’s Association.

Mars’s story “Who Will Survive and What Will Be Left of Them?” is her attempt to reconcile her love of cinema with the industry’s long history of enabling and romanticizing the abusive actions of so-called “auteurs.”

Click here to read about the other scholarship winners: “2021 Odyssey Writing Workshop Scholarship Winners”.

[Based on a press release.]