Robert Hood: Biography, Writing Career, Writing, Editorial Work, Awards, Bibliography, and a List of Books by Author Robert Hood

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Robert (Maxwell) Hood (born July 24, 1951) is an Australian writer and editor recognised as one of Australia's leading horror writers. He has published five young adult novels, three collections of his short fiction, fifteen children's books and over 100 short stories in anthologies and magazines in Australia and overseas. He has also written plays, academic articles and poetry and co-edited anthologies of horror and crime. He has been nominated for three Aurealis Awards and eight Ditmars. In 2006 Hood won a Ditmar Award for Best Collection for Daikaiju! Giant Monster Tales (edited with Robin Pen) and another in 2009 for his film review and commentary website, Undead Backbrain.

Biography more less

Robert Hood was born in 1951 in the Sydney suburb of Parramatta. At the age of nine he moved with his family to Collaroy Plateau on the northern beaches of Sydney. His initial experiments in writing began in primary school, where he produced short “flash fiction” style pieces. He continued to write fiction throughout his teens, and in first year of high school commenced his first full length piece, which he later described with retrospective humour as ”a bad Dr Who-type scifi novel”, featuring an eccentric professor with a beautiful daughter combating alien invaders and carnivorous plants. He wrote in school exercise books, and not infrequently during his mathematics lessons.

He was interested in fantastic themes, particularly horror and science fiction, from an early age, and recalls devising childhood schemes to convince his parents to allow him to watch late night horror movies. He was fascinated with both classic representations of horror such as Dracula, Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and more modern examples including “short stories in the form of Weird Tales magazine, Alfred Hitchcock anthologies and the Pan Book of Horror Stories.” He also produced fiction pieces in response to English writing assignments that were far more extensive, elaborate and inventive that expected, and always of a fantastic nature. His teachers made attempts to steer him towards writing in a more naturalistic style, but he eventually won them over with his persistance and inventiveness. After reading HG Wells's War of the Worlds he became an avid reader of science fiction, but also took an interest in a wide range of literary forms.

He commenced study in English Literature at Macquarie University in 1970. His thesis for MA (hons) analysed monster imagery in the works of William Blake. While at Macquarie University, he wrote ‘Caesar or Nothing’, a story about a madman taking over the world. With the encouragement of Thea Astley, his tutor, he submitted the piece to ABC Radio and it became his first professional sale, being broadcast on 28 February 1975. In the same year he won the Canberra Times National Short Story competition, however it was another decade before he wrote and sold stories on a regular basis.

After completing his studies, Hood entered the teaching profession and in the following ten years wrote on an irregular basis and submitted stories only sporadically, making some sales in literary journals. He saw little wider success until he left teaching - which he found a demanding profession leaving him little energy for writing - and began a regular writing regime and became persistent in submitting his work. In the late 1980s he wrote a general fiction piece and under advice from a member of a writing group he was involved in, reworked the structure to create piece with a greater sense of temporal discontinuity and a more bizarre leaning. Concurrently he decided to transform the story into a crime tale story, after his realisation that the presence of a corpse in the story might make it suitable for that market. The resulting tale “Dead End”, became his most republished piece and after submitting the tale to a crime competition and winning, gave him contacts that were significant in launching his writing career.

He has otherwise worked in a variety of fields including welding, catering and in a bookshop. He worked as a journalist for the Sydney suburban Liverpool Leader local newspaper and also drew an editorial cartoon on a weekly basis for the publication for close to a decade. Additionally he has worked a research assistant in Australian political history and as a comedy writer for a 2SM breakfast show.

His first wife was poet Margaret J. Curtis with whom he worked in the Nexus Theatre Co. His second wife was poet Deb Westbury. He currently lives in Wollongong with his partner...writer, designer and Agog! Press editor Cat Sparks and is Graphic Design & Editorial Officer for the Economics Faculty at the University of Wollongong.

Writing Career more less

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Editorial Work more less

He was co-founder, with Bill Congrieve of MirrorDanse Books and is also involved in Agog! Press with his Partner, Cat Sparks.

He has published five fiction anthologies as co-editor, including three collections of 'Daikaiju' giant monster tales.

Crosstown Traffic (1993)

The anthology blurs the traditional boundaries of genre expectations by commissioning twelve crime stories from Australian writers, in each case challenging the writer to produce a story that also worked with the conventions of another genre; examples include the western, romance, science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Many of the tales have a bizarre or horror leaning giving the collection a dark fantasy sensibility. It is co-edited with Stuart Coupe and Julie Ogden who were editors of the Mean Streets crime fiction magazine, and includes stories by Jean Bedford, Dominic Cadden, Bill Congreve, Peter Corris, Marele Day, Garry Disher, Terry Dowling, Kerry Greenwood, Robert Hood, Jan McKemmish, Robert Wallace and Steve Wright.

Bonescribes: Year’s Best Australian Horror 1995 (1996)

Co-edited with Bill Congreve, the anthology was the first Australian annual collection of horror stories, showcasing ten horror tales published during 1995, together with a history of Australian horror and a recommended reading list. The collection includes horror tales by Australian writers typically known for their genre fiction such as Stephen Dedman and Leanne Frahm, and those known for their literary fiction, such as Carmel Bird and Garry Disher. It also included one of Hood stories, "Dead in the Glamour of Moonlight".

Daikaiju Anthologies

A series of three anthologies of stories about giant monsters, known as 'Daikaiju' in Japanese and familiar through examples such as Godzilla and King Kong. The volumes are co-edited with Robin Pen and comprising Daikaiju!: Giant Monster Tales (2004), Daikaiju!2: Revenge of the Giant Monsters (2007), Daikaiju!3: Giant Monsters vs the World (2007). All three are published by Agog! Press.

The first of the three anthologies was awarded the Ditmar for best collection in 2006. Two stories from the collection "The Greater Death of Saito Saku" by Richard Harland and "Once Giants Roamed the Earth" by Rosaleen Love were joint winners of the Fantasy Short Story category in the 2006 Aurealis Awards.

While the Daikaiju genre had previously been well represented in film and comics, it was not well established as a literary genre and there had been few examples published prior to Hood’s anthologies. A call for stories on the theme brought a surprising number and range of tales from around the world and tapped a vein of enthusiasm among writers who had been waiting for such an opportunity. Submissions included stories that invoked the essence of the genre but also those that envisioned new and original ideas drawn from its sensibilities.

A number of short listed stories were unable to be included in the first volume due to size constraints. Hood had originally intended to publish these in an e-publication, as anthologies on daikaiju are infrequently published and the stories might find difficulty finding a market elsewhere. However a relationship between Agog! and Prime Books in the US, the development of low costs print on demand technology and Prime’s support in getting Agog! books on Amazon.com made it more cost effective to produce further volumes.