Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti - Picador Guest Professor in the summer semester of 2021
Sheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Motherhood, How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor, and the story collection, The Middle Stories. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages.
Her most recent novel Motherhood deals with the decision of whether to have children. The novel was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of their top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the best book of the year. It has been translated into 18 different languages.
Her novel How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as “one of the most talked-about books of the year.”
Sheila Heti has received fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Fundacion Valparaiso, the Banff Centre, and Santa Maddalena. Besides her work as an author, Heti is the former Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey and John Currin. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere.
Heti has taught at universities including Princeton, Columbia, Brown, Yale, Claremont, Wesleyan, Rice University, and the University of Toronto.
Read an excerpt from How Should a Person Be? here: https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781250032447
Read an excerpt from Motherhood here: https://us.macmillan.com/excerpt?isbn=9781250214782
Sheila Heti in conversation with Teresa Bücker
Sheila Heti is the 29th Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig. Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels “Motherhood”, “How Should a Person Be?”, and the story collection, “The Middle Stories”. She was featured by the New York Times as one of “The New Vanguard”; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her books have been translated into twenty-two languages.
Teresa Bücker works as a freelance journalist, moderator and consultant. Until June 2019, she worked as editor-in-chief of the online magazine EDITION F and was awarded “Journalist of the Year” in 2017 and again in the category “Culture” in 2019. At conferences, in magazines, on television and in workshops, she regularly discusses the changing world of work (new work, organizational culture, leadership, diversity & inclusion), justice, power, sexual empowerment and digital strategies for journalism.
On May 19, Sheila Heti read from her books “The Middle Stories” and “How Should a Person Be?” and talked with Teresa Bücker about writing, her time as a Picador Guest Professor, online seminars, sex and feminism.
Conversation in English. Watch the video on YouTube.
