Sheila Heti – författare

'It made me want to write' Sally Rooney'A seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity' Margaret Atwood'A classic in the making' StylistSheila's twenties were going to plan.She got married.She hosted parties.A theatre asked her to write a play.Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play.That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party.And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall.So Sheila abandons her marriage and her play, befriends Margaux, a free and untortured painter, and begins sleeping with the dominating Israel, who's a genius at sex but not at art. She throws herself into recording them and everyone around her, investigating how they live, desperate to know, as she wanders, How Should a Person Be? Using transcripts, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, Heti crafts an exciting, courageous, and mordantly funny tour through one woman's heart and mind.LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

'A response - finally - to the new norms of femininity' Rachel CuskHaving reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice.In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how - and for whom - to live.'Likely to become the defining literary work on the subject' Guardian 'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman'Quietly affecting... As concerned with art as it is with mothering' Sally Rooney'Groundbreaking in its fluidity' Spectator **A Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Irish Times, Refinery29, TLS and The White Review Book of the Year **

On a cold, rainy night, an aging bachelor named George Ticknor prepares to visit his childhood friend Prescott, a successful man who is now one of the leading intellectual lights of their generation. With a hastily baked pie in his hands, and a lifetime of guilt and insecurity weighing upon his soul, he sets out for the Prescotts' dinner party - a party at which he'd just as soon never arrive. Distantly inspired by the real-life friendship between the great historian William Hickling Prescott and his biographer, "Ticknor" is a witty, fantastical study of resentment; and a biting history of a one-sided friendship.

In 2019, the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University co-organized an exhibition of a newly commissioned body of work by the Canadian artist Liz Magor. The accompanying publication, Liz Magor: BLOWOUT, is the artist’s first US catalog in ten years, and it features thorough photographic documentation of the new work, commissioned texts by Mitch Speed and Sheila Heti, and a conversation between the artist and curators Dan Byers and Solveig Øvstebø.For more than four decades, Magor’s practice has quietly dramatized the relationships that develop among objects, and she describes this body of work as “a collection of tiny and intense narratives.” Each written contribution responds in its own way to Magor’s new installations, which feature altered stuffed toys, bits of paper, and rat skins—sculptural “agents,” in the artist’s words—suspended in transparent Mylar box forms, and thirty-two pairs of secondhand shoes, each displayed within its own box amidst elaborate embellishments.

** SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2023**** WINNER OF THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD IN FICTION**Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and moreWhat if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed?In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling and a shape-shifting epic that is celestially bright and streaked with beauty.'Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.' Avni Doshi'This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.' Observer'An original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.' Anne Enright, Guardian'A treat.' Stylist_______________________PRAISE FOR SHEILA HETI:'Exhilarating...it made me want to write' Sally Rooney, on How Should a Person Be?'Sheila Heti has broken new ground' Rachel Cusk, on Motherhood'Complex, artfully messy and hilarious' Miranda July, on How Should a Person Be? 'Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving' Garth Greenwell, on Motherhood'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman, on Motherhood

Sheila Heti collected hald a millions words from a decade's worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.