Biography
Dirk Vandereyken cites several pivotal events leading up to his life as a journalist, writer, actor and PR consultant, the first of which is a class presentation about 'The Lord of the Rings' that Dirk witnessed when he was 10 years old. Shortly after the presentation, Dirk ran to the library and took out the collected works of Tolkien, devouring 'The Lord of the Rings' in only 2 weeks' time. He had come into contact with role-playing games one year before and had now found a common link, which led him to join a club of mature tabletop gamers.
At age 11, Dirk wrote 'IJs de verloren planeet', a science fantasy novel. The novel was published 3 years later, making Dirk Belgium's youngest (SF) author ever. At age 15, Dirk applied to become Regional Director for the Role-Playing Game Association Network for Belgium and soon landed the job. Seizing the opportunity to visit England and the United States at least a few times a year, the young author had to call in sick at school quite often, leading to his classmates sending him a postcard which stated: 'Congratulations with your 55th day of absence!' Dirk often cites his supportive parents as the main reason why he was able to develop his personality and skills, and gain the necessary contacts and experience to make his name known in the world of RPG's and the media.
Dirk started to study hypnosis in England and continued his education as a hypnotherapist in Belgium. Since this wasn't an academic study, he also added psychology at university, but quit after a few years because he didn't think it was making him a better therapist and because he saw too many of his fellow students get a degree without having the social skills and creativity Dirk deems necessary to be an excellent therapist. He chose to pursue a private education instead, delving into Neuro-Linguistig Programming, Hellinger family constellations, Stephen Gilligan's Self Relations, Ericksonian speech and Facial Action Coding System.
Over the years, Dirk had been the driving force behind fanzines 'The Fighting Bard' and 'Mandragon' and he soon became a true accredited journalist, working for dozens of print magazines and websites. He still works for a lot of different publications, some of which are his own.
Dirk's latest two novels, 'Fates Worse Than Death: Hunter' and 'Baour, Strands of Death', were published in print by Vajra Enterprises and BlackWyrm Books, respectively. He has also worked behind the scenes for several movies, sometimes as a ghost script writer, sometimes as an actors' director, sometimes as a martial arts choreographer and sometimes as a PR consultant. Before starting to handle the PR for movie companies and theatrical releases, he did the PR for the Belgian releases of DVD's and Blu-rays such as 'The Black Dahlia Murders', some of the 'Saw' films, 'Gravedancers', 'Minotaur', a re-release of 'Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain', many other films and National Geographic and Discovery Channel documentaries.. Dirk isn't only responsible for the public relations for several movie companies, but also for certain events, bands, artists, a beauty institute, CrossFit and more. Dirk also teaches acting, communication, hypnosis, NLP, lie detection,presentation and debating techniques and more. He is an accomplished martial artist, singer and songwriter as well, having fronted his own band in the past. Dirk has returned to the music business and is planning to one day mount a true progressive power metal musical in Las Vegas.
