The 2024 Butler and Worldbuilder Scholars

Tanisha Tekriwal is this year’s Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient

This scholarship has been donated annually since 2007 by the Carl Brandon Society to writers of color attending Clarion and Clarion West. Octavia attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970 and taught at Clarion San Diego and Clarion West for many years; this scholarship offers BIPOC writers a similar opportunity to emerge into the speculative fiction scene.

Tanisha Tekriwal is a writer and filmmaker based in Mumbai. They are interested in stories of family, language, gender, and empire. They have been awarded a scholarship from Bread Loaf and a residency from Tin House. They were selected for The Queer Writer’s Room, hosted by the Iowa International Writing Program and The Queer Muslim Project. They hold a BA from Northwestern University and are currently working on their first novel.

Learn more about the Butler scholarship here.

Conrad Loyer is the 2024 Worldbuilder Scholar

The Worldbuilder is a full scholarship funded by George R. R. Martin and anonymously judged by Martin’s team. The scholarship is awarded to a budding fantasy writer with superb elements of worldbuilding in their work. As Martin writes in his blog: “The best fantasy carries us far from the fields we know, to worlds beyond the hill, worlds that, once visited, live on in our imaginations for the rest of our lives.”

Conrad Loyer is a writer from Los Angeles currently pursuing his MFA from the University of Alabama. His work has been published in Westwind and Berkeley Fiction Review. He lives with two humans and one cat, and probably some assorted bugs who haven’t introduced themselves.

Learn more about the Worldbuilder scholarship here.