STEVEN HEIGHTON was the author of the novel Afterlands, which has been nominated for the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award and was a Globe and Mail, National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Vancouver Province, and Vancouver Sun Best Book in 2005. Afterlands subsequently appeared in the United States, where it was a New York Times Book Review and a Historical Novels Review Editors' Choice; in Britain, where it was a Scotland on Sunday, Glasgow Herald, Independent and TheSocialEdge.com Book of the Year; and in Australia, Germany, and the Netherlands. He was also the author of The Shadow Boxer, which was a Canadian bestseller and a Publishers' Weekly Book of the Year in 2002. His other fiction books include 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 has been translated into ten languages, internationally anthologized and nominated for the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Trillium Book Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Journey Prize and Britain's W.H. Smith Award. He has also won 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; in 2004 he was the Massey College writer-in-residence at the University of Toronto. Steven Heighton died in 2022.