Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist and writer working in English, born in Toronto on December 25, 1976.
Heti received her education at the University of Toronto and the National Theatre School of Canada, a pairing that placed her at the intersection of literary and theatrical traditions early in her formation. She has also worked as an editor, a role that runs alongside her writing life rather than separate from it. Her fiction includes the novels How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour, two works that represent significant points in her published output.
The recognition her writing has received reflects sustained engagement with her work across both national and international contexts. She was awarded the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, one of Canada's most prominent literary honors. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a distinction granted by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to writers and artists working across a wide range of disciplines.
Across her novels, Heti has returned consistently to questions of how life is lived and rendered in prose, with How Should a Person Be? and Pure Colour each engaging in their own way with the texture of consciousness and existence. Her work in English, produced from her base in Canada, occupies a space where fiction and inquiry move closely together.
Quotes by Sheila Heti
The thing I worry about is, what happens when your talent flees? Because you see that with writers sometimes: they start writing these awful books. And there's something sort of horrifying about it.
Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl.
Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors.
Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen.
The reason I write is because I have questions. What I don't want is for people to forget that I'm a novelist and think I'm a sociologist or something. I don't want to feel trapped into a corner where I don't belong.
I feel like every single time I've published a book, there's some little light in me that goes out. I've seen the way people can misunderstand or misinterpret things, if not maliciously, then without a lot of sensitivity.
There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not.
To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world.