Dominique Hecq grew up in the French-speaking part of Belgium. She read Germanic Philology at the University of Liège and then flew over to Australia where she completed a PhD on exile in Australian Literature. She also holds an MA in Literary Translation. Dominique is the author of a novel, three collections of short fiction, five books of poetry and two plays. Over the years, her work has been awarded a variety of prizes, including The Melbourne Fringe Festival Award for Outstanding Writing and Spoken Word Performance (1998), The New England Review Prize for Poetry (2005), The Martha Richardson Medal for Poetry (2006), and the inaugural AALITRA Prize for Literary Translation in poetry from Spanish into English (2014). Her poems have been published in anthologies, journals and on websites in Australia and overseas. Having recently reconnected with her mother-tongue, Dominique is currently negotiating the pleasures and perils of self-translation. Hush: a fugue (2017) is her latest book of poetry, followed by the prose poetry sequence entitled "Songlines" (Hedgehog, 2023).