Nicholas Heiney was born in 1982, the son of the journalists Paul Heiney and Libby Purves and brother of the actress and writer

Rose Heiney. He was educated at Coldfair Green Primary School, Suffolk, at the Abbey and (briefly)Woodbridge Schools, and the Royal Hospital School, Holbrook.  In his last six years he sailed widely, crossing both the Atlantic and the Pacific as a deckhand aboard the square-rigged barque Europa, and training young Koreans in seamanship. He learned to dive, rowed for his Oxford college, and enthusiastically took part in cycle racing.

    After his degree in English Language and Literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, he studied for a short while as a postgraduate at Liverpool University,specializing in Imagist poetry, but became disillusioned with the literary critical industry, writing that ‘Literature is often flamboyant and frivolous and should be written about in such a way’.

He took his life on the 26th June, 2006, after a long and well-concealed battle with severe mental disturbance.