Chris Heffernan grew up in Adelaide. Initially he wrote poetry, becoming involved with the Friendly Street group of poets and being published in Australian literary journals. In the early 1990s he moved to Thailand, where he immersed himself in Thai culture and worked for many years in the field of education. In 2007 he returned to Australia with a bi-cultural family in tow. He spent the next several years on the academic staff at the University of Adelaide and writing Deliria, his first novel. He was back in Thailand writing his second novel—set in Bangkok and Sydney—when he passed away unexpectedly in 2014, aged just fifty-two.
