Heather is a specialist in languages and literature. Her PhD from Cambridge University focused on themes of place and displacement in French and Spanish poetry between the two world wars. She has lectured in twentieth-century Hispanic Studies at the University of Hull and King’s College London, where she was also admissions tutor, and has taught languages to all ages in a range of educational settings. More recently, she spent a year as visiting scholar in the Department of Comparative Literature at City University, New York, where she was completing research for her biography of Lee Child, one of the world’s bestselling writers of popular fiction. She has written extensively for The Independent and moonlights as a professional ghostwriter. In a prior incarnation she played and taught the classical guitar, and it was music that first brought her to London from the wild west of Australia.
Selected publications
‘Goodbye, Wendy’ (short story), The Independent, 2021
‘The Obscure French Thriller That May Hold the Secret to Jack Reacher’s World’, CrimeReads, 2021
‘Very Different Writers, Uncanny Commonalities: On Lee Child and Heidi James’, LitHub, 2021
The Reacher Guy: the authorised biography of Lee Child, Hachette, 2020
‘Gendered Language is the Last Stronghold of Binarism’, The Independent, 2019
