Terence Hawkins

Ideas drive all of Terence Hawkins’ work. His latest book, The Rage of Achilles, is an extensively revised and re-imagined edition of his first novel. In it, Homer’s epic heroes are no more glorious than the tired, scared grunts they command. Informed by Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind, its gods are only the hallucinations of men and women desperate for direction in the collapsing society of the late Bronze Age. Hawkins’ realistic account of Homeric warfare has been described as “visceral,” and his prose “elegant and terse.” In a Best Book of 2020 review, Kirkus called Hawkins' short story collection Turing's Graveyard "extraordinary stories that will make readers laugh, shiver, or perhaps both." Booklist described it as "a beautiful reading experience” and compared it to the Twilight Zone. In naming his second novel, American Neolithic, a Year’s Best, Kirkus described it as "a towering work of speculative fiction." Its revised edition was compared to Orwell's 1984 in Midwest Book Review. Hawkins was the founding Director of the Yale Writers' Conference, which he managed and developed from 2011 to 2015. In 2014, he started the Company of Writers, offering workshops and manuscript services to writers at all levels of experience. The Company has hosted seminars with Amy Bloom and Colum McCann, as well as a program on the intersection of literary and genre fiction with John Crowley and Louis Bayard. Hawkins grew up in a small town in southwestern Pennsylvania. His home county was the site of the original “Night of the Living Dead.” His grandfathers and several uncles were coal miners. He graduated from Yale, where he was publisher of the Yale Daily News. He lives in Connecticut.