Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of 11 books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." The Washington Post called her “one of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today… one of our best living authors.” Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages.

Her new book, Alphabetical Diaries, appeared in several versions, and in 2023 was excerpted over 10 weeks in the New York Times. It was culled from 500,000 words of diary entries spanning ten years.

She is the current Alice Munro Chair of Creativity at Western University in London, Ontario. In 2022, she was the Franke Visiting Fellow at Yale, and an Associate Research Scholar and Lecturer in Religious Studies, teaching Fate and Chance in Art and Experience with Noreen Khawaja.

In 2022, she published the novel Pure Colour. It was the recipient of the 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction in Canada, and received the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in the Fiction category.

That same year, she published A Garden of Creatures, a book for children about death, with illustrations by Esmé Shapiro.

Motherhood was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of the top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the Best Book of the year.

How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was chosen as a best book of the year in The New Yorker and many other places, and was cited by Time as "one of the most talked-about books of the year.”

Women in Clothes, a collaboration with Leanne Shapton, Heidi Julavits, and 639 women from around the world, became a New York Times bestseller.

She is also the author of We Need a Horse, a children’s book which was published by McSweeney’s, with art by Clare Rojas.

She published her first book, the story collection The Middle Stories in 2001, when she was twenty-four. A few years later, she published her first novel, Ticknor.

Her play, All Our Happy Days are Stupid, had sold-out runs at The Kitchen in New York, and at Videofag and Harbourfront in Toronto.

She served as Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine from 2010 - 2014, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists for them and other magazines, including conversations with Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Alanis Obomsawin, Dave Hickey, Daveed Diggs, and John Currin.