Kathryn Heyman is an Australian writer of novels and plays. She is the director of the Australian Writers Mentoring Program[1] and Fiction Program Director of Faber Writing Academy.[2]
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]
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]
Books
The Breaking. Phoenix House (1997); Allen & Unwin (2012) ISBN9781743314944
Keep Your Hands on the Wheel. Phoenix House (1999); Allen & Unwin (2012) ISBN9781743315354
The Accomplice. Hodder Headline (2003); Allen & Unwin (2012) ISBN9781743314357