Heather Taylor Johnson
Author of Literary Fiction
based in SA
Heather Taylor-Johnson is an American Australian living and working on Kaurna Land. Her second novel, Jean Harley was Here, was shortlisted for the Readings Prize for New Fiction and published in Australia and America. A third novel – a work of autofiction called Little Bit – was published this August and chosen as one of Jason Steger’s books of the year on ABC’s The Bookshelf.
She’s the author of five poetry collections and one verse novel. She is the editor of Shaping the Fractured Self: Poetry of Chronic Illness and Pain, winner of the Mascara Literary Avant Garde Award for Best Anthology and read in disability circles around the world. She’s won the Island Nonfiction Prize and been shortlisted for ABR’s Calibre Prize with essays on art and illness, and she received a major Arts Fellowship from Arts South Australia to write more. Her work was chosen for the prestigious Griffith Review Novella Prize, and twice she’s been shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize. She’s been awarded fellowships and residencies at Varuna, Bundanon, the Gaugh Whitlam Centre and The Anderson Centre in the US. She’s presented at Byron and Melbourne Writers Festivals, Queensland Poetry Festival and Poetry on the Move in Canberra.
