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50 words (updated August 2023)

Kate Heartfield’s latest novel is The Valkyrie, a retelling of legends. Her 2022 novel The Embroidered Book won Canada’s Aurora award, as did her debut novel, republished as The Chatelaine in 2023. Her novellas, stories and games have been shortlisted for multiple awards. A former journalist, Kate lives in Canada.

100 words (updated November 2023)

Kate Heartfield’s latest novel is The Valkyrie, a retelling of old Norse and Germanic legends. Her 2022 novel The Embroidered Book won Canada’s Aurora award, as did her debut novel, which was republished in a revised edition as The Chatelaine in 2023. She also writes interactive fiction through Choice of Games, and Assassin’s Creed tie-in novels. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the World Fantasy, Nebula, Locus, Aurora, Sunburst and Crawford awards, as well as the Ottawa Book Award, and her journalism for a National Newspaper Award. Kate grew up in Manitoba and now lives in Ottawa.

150 words (updated November 2023)

Kate Heartfield’s latest novel is The Valkyrie, a retelling of old legends. Her 2022 novel The Embroidered Book was a Sunday Times and Globe and Mail bestseller; it won the Aurora Award and was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award. Her debut novel won Canada’s Aurora Award; it was rereleased in a revised edition as The Chatelaine in 2023. She also writes interactive fiction, including two projects published by Choice of Games, and she has written tie-in novels for the Assassin’s Creed videogame world. Kate has published two novellas about a time-travelling highwaywoman, Alice Payne Arrives and Alice Payne Rides. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Nebula, Locus, Aurora, Sunburst and Crawford awards. A former newspaper journalist, Kate lives in Ottawa, Canada, where she teaches journalism and creative writing and works as a freelance writer. In 2015, she was a finalist for the National Newspaper Award in editorial writing.

Long bio (updated April 2024)

Kate Heartfield is an author, teacher and editor in Ottawa, Canada. Her next novel, The Tapestry of Time, is coming from HarperVoyager UK in autumn 2024. It tells the story of four clairvoyant sisters in France and England during the Second World War, as they race against Nazi occultists for control of the Bayeux Tapestry.

Most of her novels combine a historical setting with a speculative element, and she frequently explores feminist themes in her work. In her novel The Valkyrie (2023, HarperVoyger UK), the women who’ve taken the blame for catastrophe in several Norse and Germanic legends rewrite their story. Her novel The Embroidered Book (2022, HarperVoyager UK), a historical fantasy about Marie Antoinette and her sister Maria Carolina, explores themes of women and power in the Enlightenment. It was a Sunday Times, Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Ottawa Book Award, and won the Aurora Award for Best Novel.

She also writes tie-in fiction. Her novel Assassin’s Creed: The Magus Conspiracy was published in summer 2022, from Aconyte Books, and the sequel, Assassin’s Creed: The Resurrection Plot, in summer 2023.

Kate’s first novel, Armed in Her Fashion, was published by ChiZine Publications in 2018. It received a starred review from Publishers Weekly, and won the Aurora Award for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the Crawford and Locus awards. It was re-released from HarperVoyager UK in 2023 in a revised edition, as The Chatelaine. It’s a weird, dark medieval fantasy about a woman who leads a raid on Hell to get back the money she’s owed from her dead husband.

Also in 2018, she published the time travel novella Alice Payne Arrives (Tor.com Publishing) and the interactive novel The Road to Canterbury (Choice of Games). Both were finalists for the Nebula Awards. The second Alice Payne book is Alice Payne Rides (Tor.com Publishing, March 2019). Both Alice Payne novellas were shortlisted for the Aurora Awards. Her second game for Choice of Games, The Magician’s Workshop, was published in December 2019, and it was shortlisted for the Nebula Award.

Her novella “The Course of True Love” was published by Abaddon Books as part of the collection Monstrous Little Voices: New Tales from Shakespeare’s Fantasy World in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Lackington’s, Escape Pod and elsewhere, and has been longlisted three times for the Sunburst Award.

Kate is a former board member of the Ottawa International Writers Festival. She has served on juries for the Ottawa Book Award and the Sunburst Award. Her agent is Jennie Goloboy at the Donald Maass Literary Agency, and she is represented for film by Angela Cheng Caplan. Kate is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, of Codex, and the writers group The East Block Irregulars.

She grew up mainly in northern Ontario and Manitoba, and spent a year in Belize as a teenager. She graduated from the political science program at the University of Ottawa in 1999, and received her master’s degree in journalism from Carleton University in 2001. Her journalistic work has appeared in several publications. From 2004 to 2015, she was a member of the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, the daily broadsheet in Canada’s capital. She wrote a regular column on politics and social affairs, wrote and edited editorials, and acquired and edited opinion pieces for the newspaper. She was the editorial pages editor, a masthead position, for two years before she left the newspaper in 2015. That year, she was a finalist for the National Newspaper Award in editorial writing.

Kate lives on the rural outskirts of Ottawa, Canada, with her partner and their son. She teaches journalism at Carleton University and works as a freelance writer and editor. In her spare time, she plays piano and practices medieval swordplay.

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AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS (year listed is the year the award was given out)

  • Long list: British Science Fiction Awards, for The Valkyrie, 2024
  • Finalist: Ottawa Book Award, for The Embroidered Book, 2023
  • Finalist: World Fantasy Award, for The Morning House, 2023
  • Winner: The Aurora Award, for The Embroidered Book, 2023
  • Winner: Aurora Award for Best Novel, for Armed in Her Fashion, 2019
  • Finalist: Aurora Award for Best Novella, for Alice Payne Arrives: 2019
  • Finalist: Aurora Award for Best Novella, for Alice Payne Rides: 2020
  • Finalist: Locus Award for Best First Novel: for Armed in Her Fashion, 2019
  • Finalist: Nebula Award for Best Novella: for Alice Payne Arrives, 2019
  • Finalist: Nebula Award for Game Writing: for The Road to Canterbury, 2019
  • Finalist: Nebula Award for Game Writing: for The Magician’s Workshop, 2020
  • Finalist: Crawford Award, for Armed in Her Fashion, 2019
  • Shortlist Finalist: Sunburst Award for Best Novel, for Armed in Her Fashion, 2019
  • Shortlist Finalist: Sunburst Award for Best Short Story, for The Inland Beacon, 2020
  • Longlist Finalist: Sunburst Award for Best Short Story, for A Threadbare Carpet, 2019
  • Longlist Finalist: Sunburst Award for Best Short Story, for Not Valid for Spain, 2018
  • Longlist Finalist: Sunburst Award for Best Short Story, for The Seven O’Clock Man, 2017
  • Finalist for National Newspaper Award in Editorial Writing, 2016

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Permission is granted to use the below photos in press coverage or for promotional purposes. Credit is Robert de Wit, and it was taken in 2022.

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