About Heather
Heather Dune Macadam began her career as a performance artist and dancer with the Martha Graham Contemporary Dance Company. After an accident prematurely ended her performing career she began writing. Dancers are fairly quiet people but since she discovered writing, she hasn’t shut up!
Ms. Macadam’s latest book, 999: The Extraordinary Young Women of the First Official Transport to Auschwitz will be released by Kensington Citadel Press in the USA in January 2020. and is creating a bit of a buzz on BookBuzz where it was picked as one of the top 10 nonfiction books for Fall/Winter 2019. Being translated into 12 languages to date, it will be released in the UK as The Nine Hundred by Hodder and Stoughton (February 2020). A documentary with the same title is in post-production.
Heather Dune’s first book, was the memoir RENA’S PROMISE: A STORY OF SISTERS IN AUSCHWITZ, which she co-wrote with the 716th woman in Auschwitz. In 2012, the Digital Edition went viral and became an instant best-seller, topping Holocaust and Memoir lists on Amazon. Please visit her on Rena’s Promise and now the 999thefirstwomeninAuschwitz Facebook pages.
Heather Dune ventured into fiction in 2000 and released THE WEEPING BUDDHA, a murder mystery based on the disappearance of Sam Todd, who was celebrating New Year’s Eve in the loft where Macadam and her loft mates lived in Chinatown, NY. Sam went for a walk and never came back. It was a finalist for the Nero Wolf Best Mystery-2002.
She has been published by The New York Times, National Geographic, The Guardian UK, The Daily Mail, Marie Claire, and Newsweek among other national and international publications, and was a semi-regular commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered.
Ms. Macadam holds a Masters in Creative Writing and has received a Presidential Grant for Research from Savannah College of Art and Design and a PEN American stipend. She and Rena were named Outstanding Writers of the Year in Hendersonville, North Carolina in 1995 or 1996–it was a long time ago, who can remember?
Ms. Macadam is the director and president of the Rena’s Promise Foundation and ran the Rena’s Promise Intl. Creative Writing Camp 4 Teens for 5 years, reaching out to children at risk and helping them discover their creative voices. Guest artists to the camp included: Melissa Banks, Halley Feiffer, Persia Walker, Matthew Graham, Lucas Hunt, Dava Sobel, Simon Van Booy, and Simon Worrall.
She divides her time between the Hamptons in New York and Herefordshire, England, where she is a frequent visitor to the Hay Literary Festival and the Cornwall Arms.
Heather Dune Macadam should be included in that rare category of literary mystery masters such as Lawrence Block, Craig Holden, and Giles Blunt, whose lyrical prose and beautifully developed characters have a great deal to say about the troubled world we live in and its legacy of violence.
Kaylie Jones, author of Celeste Ascending and A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries