Early life

Heller was born in St Pancras, north London, as the youngest of four children of Caroline (née Carter) and Lukas Heller, a successful screenwriter; her parents separated when she was five.^[2] Her father was a German Jewish immigrant and her mother was English and a Quaker.^[3][4] Her paternal grandfather was the political philosopher Hermann Heller.^[5] Her brother is screenwriter Bruno Heller. Her sister, Lucy Heller, is Chief Executive of education charity Ark^[6] and previously Managing Director of Times Supplements Ltd, the former educational publishing wing of News UK.

She attended Haverstock School in north London where she was a contemporary of David Miliband^[7] and then studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford, gaining a first, before going on to Columbia University, New York where she received an MA on Marxist theories of literature and Jonathan Swift.^[2][8]

Career

After a period at the UK publisher Chatto and a spell as a freelance book reviewer, Heller was taken on as a staff feature writer for The Independent on Sunday.^[7] She later returned to New York in the early 1990s contracted to write for Vanity Fair. Deputizing for Nick Hornby while he was on holiday led to her reputation as a confessional writer.^[7] She wrote for The New Yorker, a weekly column for The Sunday Times Magazine in the UK,^[9] and was a columnist for The Daily Telegraph, for which she won the British Press Awards' "Columnist of the Year" in 2002.^[10] She co-wrote the screenplay for the independent film, Twenty-One (1991).