Rob Hood
| Robert Hood | |
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Robert Hood (left) with Peter Straub in 2007
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| Born |
24 July 1951 Parramatta, New South Wales |
| Occupation | Writer, editor, graphic designer |
| Nationality | Australian |
| Alma mater | Macquarie University |
| Genre | Horror, crime, fantasy, science fiction |
| Notable awards | Ditmar Award for Best Collection, William Atheling Jr. Award for Criticism or Review |
| Website | |
| www |
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Robert (Maxwell) Hood [1] (born 24 July 1951) is an Australian writer and editor recognised as one of Australia's leading horror writers, though his work frequently crosses genre boundaries into science fiction, fantasy and crime. He has published five young adult novels, four collections of his short fiction, an adult epic fantasy novel, fifteen children's books and over 120 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 won seven Ditmars out of twenty nominations, and been nominated for six Aurealis Awards.
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 persistence and inventiveness. After reading H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds he became an avid reader of science fiction, but also took an interest in a wide range of literary forms.
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