Simon Hawke

Simon Hawke, born September 30, 1951, in New York, the son of Valentin M. Yermakov (a pathologist) and Helga E. née Hartewelt (a United Nations verbatim reporter), is an American author of mainly fantasy and science fiction novels. He was born Nicholas Valentin Yermakov, but began writing as Simon Hawke in 1984 and later changed his legal name to Simon Hawke. He has also published near future adventure novels using the pseudonym J. D. Masters and a series of humorous mystery novels. He was the Colorado Writer of the Year, 1992. He married and has had children.

Career

As Nicholas Yermakov (he is half-Russian), his early books were published during 1981–1984, including two Battlestar Galactica novelizations. Since he began using the name Simon Hawke in 1984, he has produced a large quantity of fiction. Almost all of his books published after 1984 have been either part of a series and/or tie-in novels and novelizations.

His first major work as Simon Hawke was the Timewars series, which recounts the adventures of an organization tasked with protecting history from being changed by time travellers. In the world of the series, many people and events we consider fictional are historical, and vice versa; the action of each book in the series weaves in and out of the events of a famous work of literature. For example, in the first book in the series time travellers contesting the fate of Richard I of England become involved with the events of Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

He has also published a series of humorous murder mysteries which features a young William Shakespeare and a fictional friend, Symington "Tuck" Smythe.

In 2017, he received the Phoenix Award from DeepSouthCon 55.