HEATHER CLARK is a biographer, literary critic, and novelist. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholars fellowship, a New York Public Library Cullman Center Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Center for Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York. She is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972, and Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction. Red Comet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2021. Red Comet was also a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times (London), The Daily Telegraph, The Boston Globe, Lit Hub, The Times of India, Trouw (Netherlands), and elsewhere, and has been translated into five languages. Clark’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard and a doctorate in English from Oxford, and was formerly Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, UK. She lives outside New York City with her husband and two children.