Sheila Heti

In May 2018, Heti published an autobiographical novel, Motherhood, focused on her deliberation on whether or not to have children. Initially conceived as a nonfiction work, Heti explores the emphasis society places on motherhood and how women are judged regardless of their decision: "...a woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Nonmothers do, too." The book was named as a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

LitHub named her novel, Motherhood, as a Favorite Book of 2018 and a New York Times Critics Pick of 2018.

In Fall 2014, Heti published a non-fiction book about women's relationship to what they wear, with co-editors Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits. It was a crowd-sourced book, featuring the voices of 639 women from around the world. The book was published by Penguin in the US and the UK, with a German edition published in 2015 by S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. It spent several months on The New York Times Best Seller list.

In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play 'All Our Happy Days are Stupid' at Toronto's Videofag. It was remounted in February 2015 at The Kitchen in New York. Heti's decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her novel How Should a Person Be?

In 2011, she published The Chairs are Where the People Go, which she wrote with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

Heti appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film, Teenager Hamlet.

Heti's How Should a Person Be? was published in September 2010. She describes it as a work of constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. It was published by Henry Holt in the United States in July 2012 in a slightly different edition (she has spoken in interviews about the edits she made), and the subtitle "A novel from life" was added. It was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012 and by James Wood of The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year. It was also included on year-end lists on Salon, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and more. In her 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she noted, "Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can't do it."

For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the sleeping dreams people were having about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers sent in.

Heti's novella, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered. It was published by House of Anansi Press in Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, and Éditions Phébus in France.

KM Hunter Artists Award, 2002; NOW Magazine Toronto Best Emerging Author 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004

Heti's first book, The Middle Stories, a collection of thirty short stories, was published by House of Anansi in Canada in 2001 when she was twenty-four. It was subsequently published by McSweeney's in the United States in 2002. It has been translated into German, French, Spanish and Dutch.

Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York, at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness". It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001.

Sheila Heti (/ˈ ʃ iː l ə ˈ h ɛ t iː / ; born 25 December 1976) is a Canadian writer.