Zoë
Ethnicity:
Her father was a German Jewish immigrant and her mother was English and a Quaker.
Heller was born in St Pancras, North London, as the youngest of four children of Caroline (née Carter) and Lukas Heller, a successful screenwriter.
She attended Haverstock School.
Heller studied English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and then went on to Columbia University, New York where she received an MA in 1988.
Heller began her career in journalism, as a feature writer for the Independent on Sunday in the UK. She later returned to New York to write for Vanity Fair and then The New Yorker. She also wrote a weekly column for the Sunday Times magazine in the UK, and was a columnist for the Daily Telegraph, for which she won the British Press Awards.
She has published three novels, Everything You Know (1999), Notes on a Scandal (2003), which was one of six books shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and made into a film in 2006, and The Believers (September 2008).
She has also been involved in the film industry, co-writing the screenplay for the 1991 independent film, Twenty-One.
