Fury

A raw, painfully honest, heartbreaking account of a young woman raising herself out of abuse and poverty to become her own hero.

This is the story of becoming heroic in a culture which does not see heroism in the shape of a girl.

At the age of twenty, after a traumatic sexual assault trial, writer Kathryn Heyman ran away from her life and became a deckhand on a fishing trawler in the Timor Sea.

The life she left behind was beyond broken. Coming from a family of poverty and violence, she had no real role models, no example of how to create a decent life, how to have hope, how to have expectations. But she was a reader. She understood story, and the power of naming. This was her salvation.

After one wild season on board the Ocean Thief, the only girl among tough working men, facing storms, treachery, and harder physical labour than she had ever known, Heyman was transformed, able to face the abuses that she thought had broken her, able to see 'all that she had been blind to, simply to survive'.

A reflection on the wider stories of class, and of growing up female with all its risks and rewards, a road map of recovery and transformation: Fury is a memoir of courage and determination, of fighting back and demanding to be seen.

About the Author

Kathryn Heyman is a novelist, essayist and scriptwriter. Her sixth novel, Storm and Grace, was published to critical acclaim in 2017. Her first novel, The Breaking, was shortlisted for the Stakis Prize for the Scottish Writer of the Year and longlisted for the Orange Prize. Other awards include an Arts Council of England Writers Award, the Wingate Scholarship, the Southern Arts Award, and nominations for the Edinburgh Fringe Critics' Awards, the Kibble Prize, and the West Australian Premier's Book Awards, as well as the 2017 Copyright Agency Author Fellowship for Fury.

Kathryn Heyman's several plays for BBC radio include Far Country and Moonlite's Boy, inspired by the life of bushranger Captain Moonlite. Two of her novels have been adapted for BBC radio: Keep Your Hands on the Wheel as a play and Captain Starlight's Apprentice as a five-part dramatic serial.

Heyman has held several writing fellowships, including the Scottish Arts Council Writing Fellowship at the University of Glasgow, and a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellowship at Westminster College, Oxford. She taught creative writing for the University of Oxford and is now Conjoint Professor in Humanities at the University of Newcastle. In 2012, she founded the Australian Writers Mentoring Program.

More information at www.kathrynheyman.com