Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in Eng­lish Lit­er­a­ture from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and her doc­tor­ate in Eng­lish from Oxford Uni­ver­si­ty. Her recent awards include a Guggen­heim Fel­low­ship; the Tru­man Capote Award for Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism; the Slight­ly Foxed Prize for Best First Biog­ra­phy; a Nation­al Endow­ment for the Human­i­ties Pub­lic Schol­ar Fel­low­ship; a Leon Levy Biog­ra­phy Fel­low­ship at the City Uni­ver­si­ty of New York; and a Vis­it­ing U.S. Fel­low­ship at the Eccles Cen­tre for Amer­i­can Stud­ies, British Library. A for­mer Vis­it­ing Schol­ar at the Oxford Cen­tre for Life-Writ­ing, 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; and The Ulster Renais­sance: Poet­ry in Belfast 1962 – 1972. 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 a New York Times Top Ten Book 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. Her work has appeared in pub­li­ca­tions includ­ing The New York Times, Har­vard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, and The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment. She lives out­side of New York City.