John Heilpern

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John Heilpern is an author, best known for his book Conference of the Birds, in which he details a journey by theatrical director Peter Brook and a group of actors across the desert of Northwest Africa in an attempt to develop a form of theatre not dependent on cultural assumptions.

Born in Manchester, England, he studied law at Oxford University and joined The Observer newspaper as a journalist. There, his profiles of Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, Rudolf Nureyev, and Graham Greene set a new standard for the form. He joined the National Theatre, working as dramaturge on Peter Hall's 1976 production of Tamburlaine. Conference of the Birds came out the same year. In 1980 he moved to New York, where he currently lives and where he is the theatre critic for the New York Observer. His biography of the playwright John Osborne is expected in 2006.

John Heilpern was an exact contemporary, close friend and intellectual rival of Howard Jacobson at Stand Grammar School in Whitefield, and much is made of that rivalry in Jacobson's first novel, Coming From Behind. There is every reason to believe that Jacobson's jealousy of Heilpern's early fame as an Observer feature writer was genuine, and the content of Heilpern's Conference of the Birds is lampooned in detail in Coming From Behind.

He married the journalist Joan Juliet Buck.