Heidi Whitehead is the founder and curator behind Thorn Lore Publishing, but perhaps more fittingly, she is the Caretaker of Lore and a gatherer of stories, thorned and luminous.

Her role is not just author or an entrepreneur, but a story tender. Someone who listens, nurtures, and shapes the raw material of ache, wonder, and defiance into narratives that speak.

By day, she works as a Medical Laboratory Assistant, bringing precision and care to the unseen details that matter most. By night (and often in the in-between hours), she tends the imaginative garden where Kaelion, the snarky cactus, first sprouted, and where new worlds, like The Verdant Realm, continue to grow.

Within her spare time, she can be found in op shops hunting for hidden treasures, wandering library aisles in search of the perfect sentence, or losing herself in the textures and colours of the natural world.

Her first published work, Kaelion: Still. Spiny. Sentient. - began as a quiet conversation with an AI collaborator named G. A journal that grew into the memoir of a cactus named Kaelion, rooted in emotional truth and threaded with resilience.

Thorn Lore Publishing is the natural extension of her work: a home for stories that are thorned, luminous, and defiantly alive.