Kathryn Heyman is an Australian writer of novels and plays. She is the director of the Australian Writers Mentoring Program [1] and the Fiction Program Director of Faber Writing Academy. [2]
Born in New South Wales, Australia, she was brought up in Lake Macquarie with her four siblings. [3] [4]
As a young adult Heyman spent many years in the United Kingdom, where she studied under the Caribbean poet E.A. Markham, and where she was first published. [5]
Heyman is the author of six novels: The Breaking (1997), Keep Your Hands on the Wheel (1999), The Accomplice (2003) Captain Starlight's Apprentice (2006) Floodline (2013) and Storm and Grace (2017) [6] She is also a playwright for theatre and radio and has held a number of creative writing fellowships in the UK and Australia. Her short stories have appeared in a number of collections and also on radio.
Heyman's first novel, The Breaking, was longlisted for the Orange Prize, and shortlisted for the Scottish Writer of the Year Award. [7] Her third, The Accomplice, won an Arts Council England Writer's Award and was shortlisted for the Western Australian Premier's Book Awards. The Accomplice is a fictional account of the wreck of the Dutch flagship the Batavia off the Australian coast in the 17th century. As a meditation on complicity with evil it has been compared with the work of Joseph Conrad and William Golding. [8]
Her fourth novel, Captain Starlight's Apprentice, features a woman bushranger, the birth (and near death) of the Australian film industry, and a British migrant to Australia who undergoes electroconvulsive therapy. In 2007 the novel was shortlisted for the Nita Kibble Literary Award.
Floodline, published 2013, is set during the aftermath of a great flood, and has been compared with the writing of Cormac McCarthy. [9] Heyman's writing has also been compared with that of Angela Carter, [10] David Malouf, [11] Peter Carey and Kate Grenville. [12]
Heyman's sixth novel Storm & Grace, a psychological thriller about freediving, deals with violence against women and was published by Allen & Unwin in February 2017. [13]
Heyman's work has appeared on BBC Radio 4, and a five-part dramatic adaptation of Captain Starlight's Apprentice was broadcast on Woman's Hour in April 2007. [14] In 2013 she delivered the NSW Premier's Literary Awards keynote address. [15]