1. Robert Maxwell Hood was born on 24 July 1951 and is an Australian writer and editor recognised as one of Australia's leading horror writers, although his work frequently crosses genre boundaries into science fiction, fantasy and crime.
32 Facts About Rob Hood
1. 2.
Rob Hood 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.
3.
Rob Hood has written plays, academic articles and poetry and co-edited anthologies of horror and crime.
4.
Rob Hood has won seven Ditmars out of twenty nominations, and been nominated for six Aurealis Awards.
5.
Rob Hood 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.
6.
Rob Hood wrote in school exercise books, and not infrequently during his mathematics lessons.
7.
Rob Hood 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.
8.
Rob Hood 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's Anthology, and the Pan Book of Horror Stories".
9.
Rob Hood 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.
10.
Rob Hood's teachers made attempts to steer him towards writing in a more naturalistic style, but he eventually won them over with his persistence and inventiveness.
11.
Rob Hood commenced study in English Literature at Macquarie University in 1970.
12.
Rob Hood has otherwise worked in a variety of fields including welding, catering and in a bookshop.
13.
Rob Hood worked as a journalist for the Sydney suburban Liverpool Leader local newspaper and drew an editorial cartoon on a weekly basis for the publication for close to a decade.
14.
Rob Hood has published over 120 short works of fiction in Australia and overseas and his work has been included in anthologies and major magazines.
15.
Rob Hood's first published story was "Caesar or Nothing", performed on ABC radio in 1975, Hood won the Canberra Times National Short Story Competition with "Orientation" the same year.
16.
Rob Hood wrote a tale featuring the Sixth Doctor and his American companion Peri.
17.
The anthology is concluded with an interview with Rob Hood, conducted by Kyla Ward.
18.
Rob Hood conceived the collection as a follow-up to his 2002 ghost-centered collection Immaterial, in this case collecting some of the best of his non-ghost-related horror stories.
19.
Rob Hood then created an original mythology based on these ideas, although he drew upon aspects of ancient Egyptian, Knights Templar and other mythologies.
20.
Rob Hood was nominated for a 2002 Ditmar for Professional Achievement for the Shades series.
21.
Rob Hood has written authoritative articles on the zombie theme in cinema, on the history of Australian horror films, and on giant monster films.
22.
Rob Hood won the 2008 Best Fan Writer Ditmar award for film reviews on his website, the 2009 Ditmar Award for Best Fan writer for his blog Undead Backbrain and was nominated for the 2009 William Atheling Jr.
23.
Rob Hood is recognised as a prominent Australian horror writer, but his work is not constrained by boundaries of genre.
24.
Rob Hood has extended this sensibility into his editorial work, co-editing Crosstown Traffic, an anthology collecting stories that purposely mix crime with a number of other genres.
25.
Rob Hood's work is marked by a deceptively straightforward style and by an intense sense of humanity underlying his, often bizarre, horror scenarios.
26.
Rob Hood has suggested that his initial passion for genre writing was sparked by the works of H G Wells, whose mixture of optimism and pessimism for the future he believes poignantly captures the dilemma of human existence.
27.
Rob Hood was greatly influenced by the writings of English romantic poet William Blake and feels that Blake's ideas and images have affected his world view and are often reflected in his writing.
28.
Rob Hood cites film as a major influence, in particular the late night horror films of his youth which led him to read classics such as Frankenstein, Dracula and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
29.
Rob Hood feels that these works and their film versions, together with classic Universal and Hammer Horror films had left him with an enduring gothic sensibility in his outlook.
30.
Rob Hood has published five fiction anthologies as co-editor, including three collections of 'Daikaiju' giant monster tales.
31.
Rob 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.
32.
Additionally, Rob Hood has been nominated for awards in the speculative fiction field on numerous occasions.