John Twelve Hawks

John Twelve Hawks (pseudonym) is the author of the 2005 dystopian novel The Traveler and its sequels, The Dark River and The Golden City, collectively comprising the Fourth Realm Trilogy. The trilogy has been translated into 25 languages and has sold more than 1.5 million books. The trilogy was followed five years later by a fourth book, Spark, and a non-fiction eBook, Against Authority. "John Twelve Hawks" is a pseudonym and his real identity is unknown.

In Against Authority, Twelve Hawks describes writing The Traveler. His decision to use a pen name was triggered by a combination of personal and political reasons:

For the first drafts of the book, I kept my birth name off the title page. The old me wasn’t writing this book. Something was different. Something had changed. I had always admired George Orwell, and had read his collected essays and letters countless times. When Eric Blair became Orwell, he was set free, liberated from his Eton education and colonial policeman past. And there was another factor about the title page that troubled me. I was telling my readers that this new system of information technology was going to destroy our privacy, and that they should resist this change. It seemed hypocritical to go on a book tour or appear on a talk show blabbing about my life when our private lives were under attack.

During an online conversation he had with his fans on the We Speak for Freedom website, he explained the origin of his name:

The real story is this …I was walking through a forest and encountered a hawk nesting area. Twelve hawks circled around my head for about ten minutes …so close that the tip of their wings brushed the side of my head. That was why I picked the name. REAL hawks. Not symbolic ones.

In the sources listed and in his interviews, he has stated that he was born in the United States. He is a Buddhist who had meditated for most of his life. In the Spiegel interview he states he is not a Native American.

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