Dominic Smith
Dominic Smith grew up in the Blue Mountains and in Bondi Beach but has spent about half his life in the United States. He currently lives in Austin, Texas—the live music capital of the world and a little oasis of liberalism in a sea of frontier conservatism. He is the author of two novels, The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre, which was awarded the prize for best first fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and, The Beautiful Miscellaneous, which was recently optioned for a film by Southpaw Entertainment. His short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His awards include the Dobie Paisano Fellowship, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, a Michener Fellowship in Fiction, and the Gulf Coast Prize. He currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Warren Wilson College. His third novel, Bright and Distant Shores, about early skyscrapers and an ill-fated museum collecting voyage at the end of the 19th century, will be published in 2011.
Some of the writers Dominic admires include Don DeLillo, James Salter, David Malouf, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Virginia Woolf, Thomas Bernhard, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Nabokov. Nine Stories, by J. D. Salinger, is one of his all-time favorite story collections and his critical essay about that book was recently anthologized as part of Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations series.
Dominic is the father of two avid readers—daughters aged nine and thirteen who ply him with material and editorial feedback.