Steven Heighton is the author of the novel Afterlands, published in 2005 in Canada and in 2006 in the USA, where it was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. Editions have also appeared in Britain and Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. He has also published The Shadow Boxer—a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers’ Weekly Book of the Year for 2002—which appeared in five countries. His other fiction books are the story collections Flight Paths of the Emperor and On earth as it is, while his poetry collections include The Ecstasy of Skeptics and The Address Book.

His work is translated into nine languages, has appeared in Poetry, The London Review of Books, Brick, The Independent, Malahat Review, The New York Times, Agni, Stand and Revue Europe, has been internationally anthologised (Best English Stories, Best of Best English Stories, The Minerva Book of Stories and others) and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award. He has received the Lampert Award, The Petra Kenney Prize, the Air Canada Award, and gold medals for fiction and for poetry in the National Magazine Awards. In 2002-03 he was the writer-in-residence at Concordia University, and in 2004 at the University of Toronto. This year he will be an instructor at the Summer Literary Seminars in St Petersburg, Russia. He lives with his family in Kingston, Ontario.