About

Who’s knocking on my door?

Hillel F. Damron was born in Kibbutz Hephzibah in northern Israel to parents who survived the Holocaust. After graduating from high school, he worked for a year as a mentor to inner-city kids in Haifa, then joined the army and became an officer in an elite paratroop unit. He experienced war and was wounded in battle.

He studied the ‘Art and Technique’ of filmmaking at the London Film School. His final short film at the school, The Petition, represented the ‘British Arts Council’ as an official entry to the film festival in Tours, France. Back in Israel, he wrote and directed documentaries for Israeli Television, numerous video shorts, video magazines, and the feature film, ‘Hasamba and the Horse Thieves.’

He wrote film reviews and essays for ‘Iton 77,’ a New Yorker-like magazine in Tel Aviv, published short stories – one of which received a “Fantasia 2000 Magazine” award – and a Sci-Fi novel: War of the Sexes (Milchemet Haminim); referred to by the American ‘Science-Fiction Studies’ as “the best of all Israeli Sci-Fi literature.”

After leaving Israel for America, he served as the Executive Director of the Hillel at UC Davis before embarking on a writing career. His years in the trenches produced two self-published novels, Very Narrow Bridge and Unidentified Woman, as well as Sex War One (translated and adapted by him from his science fiction novel, published originally in Hebrew by Domino Press).

His screenplay, ‘Saint Daniel of L.A.,’ was awarded an Honorable Mention in the ‘Writer’s Digest Magazine’ writing competition. His short story, The Messiah, was published in ‘Sambatyon,’ a journal of Jewish writing. He is the first-place winner of Moment Magazine’s 2011 Memoir Contest, and the second-place winner of the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation 2021 Short Fiction Contest.

To contact Hillel F. Damron, click here