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Dorothy Hewett was born on 21 May 1923 in Perth, Western Australia but spent her early years on a isolated farm in the Western Australian wheat belt. Until she returned to Perth at the age of twelve to attend secondary school she was educated through correspondence lessons. She began to write poetry while she was still a child, with the aid of correspondence lessons in poetry appreciation and writing skills. In 1938 one of her poems, ‘Dreaming’, written when she was nine years old, was published in an anthology of work by school children. A collection of Hewett’s juvenilia, including poems and a play, was published in 2009 as The Gypsy Dancer and Early Poems. After completing her schooling at Perth College, Hewett commenced an Arts degree at the University of Western Australia. She continued to write prolifically and a poem by her was published in the leading Melbourne literary magazine, Meanjin, when she was nineteen. She left university without completing her degree, marrying lawyer and communist writer Lloyd Davies in 1944, with whom she had a son, who died from leukaemia at the age of three. In 1945 she was awarded first prize in a national poetry competition conducted by the ABC.
In 1945 also, Hewett joined the Communist Party and continued to be an active member until 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, when she resigned in protest. In 1948 after the breakdown of her marriage to Davies, she moved to Sydney to live for nine years with Les Flood, boiler-maker and fellow communist, with whom she had three sons. During this time she also worked at the Alexandra Spinning Mills, drawing on this experience for her novel Bobbin Up (1959). Hewett returned to Perth in 1960 and married Merv Lilley, merchant seaman and communist, that same year; they had two daughters. After completing her Arts degree at the University of Western Australia, Hewett taught in the English Department there until 1974. After receiving a grant from the newly-established Literature Board of the Australia Council, she returned to Sydney, where she lived until moving to the Blue Mountains some years before her death in 2002.