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 with 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.

After a stint as an Air Marshal on El Al Israeli Airlines during the heyday of airplane hijacking, 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, after paying his dues in many aspects of film production, he wrote and directed documentaries for Israeli Television, numerous video shorts, magazines, and the feature film Hasamba and the Horse Thieves. For five years, he was the head of the Video Production Department of Israel’s largest trade union, Histadrut.

He wrote film reviews and articles for “Iton 77,” 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.” 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.

For three years, he was the Executive Director of the Hillel at UC Davis and Sacramento State. He is the author of the novels: Very Narrow Bridge, published September 2011; Unidentified Woman, August 2012; and Sex War One (translated and adapted from his science fiction novel, published originally in Hebrew by Domino Press, 1982), December 2014. He is the first-place winner of Moment Magazine‘s 2011 Memoir Contest Award, and the second-place winner of the Moment Magazine-Karma Foundation 2021 Short Fiction Contest.

To contact Hillel F. Damron, click here