Kathryn Heyman

Kathryn Heyman is an Australian writer. Born in New South Wales, Heyman spent many years living in the United Kingdom, where she began her publishing career.

Heyman is the author of four novels: The Breaking (1997), Keep Your Hands on the Wheel (1999), The Accomplice (2003) and Captain Starlight's Apprentice (2006). 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. 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.

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.

Heyman's writing has been compared with that of Angela Carter, Peter Carey and Kate Grenville.

Heyman's work regularly appears on BBC Radio 4, and a five-part dramatic adaptation of Captain Starlight's Apprentice was broadcast on Woman's Hour in April 2007.