athryn
Heyman was born in Lismore
and grew up in Australia, where she worked as an actor, stand-up
comic, playwright and—briefly—a deckhand on a fishing
trawler. In 1992 she was invited to take part in a theatre
tour of Northern Ireland, and subsequently toured the UK and Greece
with Natural Express Theatre, before taking the MA in Writing
at Sheffield Hallam University, where she wrote her first novel.
The Breaking, published in 1997, was shortlisted for that
year's Scottish Writer of the Year Award, and longlisted for the
Orange Prize the following year. Keep Your Hands on the Wheel
followed in 1999, receiving a Southern Arts Writer's Bursary.
She was awarded a Wingate Scholarship in 2000. In 2003 The
Accomplice, her third novel, won an Arts Council of England
Writer's Award and in 2004 was shortlisted
athryn
Heyman's first radio play for the BBC was Far Country
in 2001. An adaptation of 
Keep
Your Hands on the Wheel followed. Moonlite's Boy aired
as a Saturday play in 2005. For the theatre, her work includes Unreal,
an adaptation of Paul Jennings' stories, which has had five Australian
productions; and, with the comedian Jo Enright, That's the Way
to Do It, for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which was nominated
for the Critics' Awards. She took her one-woman poetry play, Dancing
on the Word, to the Edinburgh Fringe in 1993 and won the Hallam
Poetry Prize the following year.
athryn Heyman has been a Scottish
Arts Council Writing Fellow, Writing Fellow for the University of
Glasgow and Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for Westminster College,
Oxford. As an Associate Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund she worked
with indigenous groups in Northern Australia. She has taught Creative
Writing for the University of Oxford, University of Massachusetts,
and University of Technology, Sydney. She lives with her partner
and their two children, dividing time between Australia and the
UK. 
