Steven Heighton was born on August 14, 1961, in Toronto, Ontario.

He was a Canadian fiction writer, poet, and singer-songwriter. He grew up in Toronto and Red Lake, northern Ontario. After finishing high school, he travelled and worked in western Canada and Australia. He graduated from Queen's University (B.A.; M.A.), Kingston, Ontario, and then travelled and worked for two years in Asia before settling back in Kingston and starting to write. Heighton has been the writer-in-residence at McGill University, Queen's University, Concordia University, the University of Ottawa, and Massey College at the University of Toronto. He has also led writing workshops at the Summer Literary Seminars in Saint Petersburg, Russia (2007), the May Studios at the Banff Centre for the Arts (2001), Writing with Style at the Banff Centre, and the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Blackstrap Lake, Saskatchewan (2015 and 2016). He wrote numerous novels, short stories, poetry, nonfiction, essays, and music. His work has been translated into ten languages and widely anthologized. He won the Governor General's Award for English-language poetry in 2016 for his collection “The Waking Comes Late.” His books have been nominated for the Trillium Award (twice), the Journey Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain's W.H. Smith Award (best book of the year). He received the Gerald Lampert Award, four gold and one silver awards for fiction and poetry in the National Magazine Awards, the Air Canada Award, the P.K. Page Award, the K.M. Hunter Award, and the Petra Kenney Prize. “Flight Paths of the Emperor” has been listed at Amazon.ca as one of the ten best Canadian short story collections. His nonfiction book "Reaching Mithymna: Among the Volunteers and Refugees on Lesvos" was shortlisted for the 2020 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. In April 2021, Heighton released an album of eleven original songs with Wolfe Island Records/CRS Europe. “The Devil's Share” emerges from "an alchemical bath of blues, rock, folk, country, soul, and Americana."

He died of cancer on April 19, 2022, in Kingston, Ontario.