Kate Heartfield

Kate Heartfield is a Canadian author of fantasy, science fiction, horror, as well as a non-fiction writer and editor.

Life Heartfield was born in 1977 in Kitchener, Ontario, and grew up in Winnipeg. She received a degree in political science from the University of Ottawa and a master of journalism degree from Carleton University. She worked as an editorial board member and columnist for the Ottawa Citizen from 2004 to 2015, and was editorial pages editor for the paper from 2013 to 2015. She was nominated for Canada's Canada's National Newspaper Award in the category of Editorial Writing category in 2015. She now teaches journalism at Carleton University and creative writing online for The Loft Literary Center. She lives in rural Ottawa, Canada. The novel was published by Aconyte Books on 2 August 2022 in the United States, and on 8 September in the United Kingdom. On 30 August, it was announced that the first sequel, The Resurrection Plot, had a planned release date of 2023; it was published on 4 July. In August 2024, Heartfield revealed on Twitter that, despite the initial announcement of The Engine of History as a trilogy, the publisher had no current plans for a third book in the series.

Recognition Heartfield's novel Armed in Her Fashion won the 2019 Aurora Award for Best Novel (English), was nominated for the 2019 Sunburst Award for Adult Fiction, and placed eighth in the 2019 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her interactive medieval adventure novel The Road to Canterbury was nominated for the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Game Writing. Her novella Alice Payne Arrives was nominated for the 2019 Nebula Award for Best Novella and the 2019 Aurora Award for Best Short Fiction - English. Her stories "The Seven O'Clock Man", "Not Valid for Spain", and "A Threadbare Carpet" were preliminary nominees for the Sunburst Award.