07 6 / 2012
of being forced to write about myself
Dora Hawk was born in Toledo, Philippines, a sleepy little town with nothing to do, which fed her enthusiasm for reading. Her first brush with books came in the form of illustrated fairytales and comic books which spurned her great love for Batman. She greedily devoured the works of Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Enid Blyton, T.S. Eliot and R.L. Stine before discovering Arthur Conan Doyle’s enigmatic detective, Sherlock Holmes. She began writing nonsense poetry at the age of 12 and short stories at the age of 14.
In 2003, her short story, Halo was shortlisted for the Sydney Morning Herald Young Writer of the Year Award. Also in 2003, she discovered Postmodernism and the works of Italo Calvino, Roland Barthes and Ernest Hemingway, who greatly influenced her inability to write conventional narratives.
She studied a Bachelor of Arts in Communications (Writing and Cultural Studies) at the University of Technology, Sydney where she learnt how to write Crime Fiction, Children’s Writing and Poetry. She is a compulsive drafter with an insane fear of throwing out any of her drafts. She is captivated by the mundane and the everyday life. During her brief stint as a copywriter she succumbed to the highly addictive life of blogging where her drafts are immortalised in digital space for eternity.
She has written various short stories for Vibewire portal. Two of her stories, Aphorisms in a Teapot and The Dying Art of Sleeping were published in the 2010 first and second Vibewire Quarterly anthologies. In May 2010 she was named as Vibewire Portal Contributor of the Month. Dora began writing for Mood of Monk, an online arts journal, in 2011 where she published two literary music (not) reviews.
Of Love Song and Fairytales is a collection of her most prominent short stories, most of which were influenced by Fictocriticism. The stories are vignettes of the human condition ranging from heartbreak to new love and friendship to family. They contain the ‘truths’ that anyone can find in a drunken bus ride or a lover unable to find the right way to say goodbye.
Dora currently lives in Brisbane, Australia where she is completing a Graduate Certificate of Arts (Writing, Editing and Publishing). A prolific blogger, dreamer and poet, she collects Alice’s adventures in wonderland in between learning languages and defending Hip Hop.
