Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. She taught in Victorian secondary schools until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex, and had to start writing journalism for a living.

Helen is known for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her both praise and criticism, particularly with her novels. Helen has published many works of fiction including Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Children’s Bach. Her fiction has won numerous awards including:

• The 1978 National Book Council Award for her book Monkey Grip, which was adapted for film in 1981 .
• A Walkley Award for journalism in 1993 for her  article about the murder of two-year-old Daniel Valerio.
• The Windham-Campbell literary prize for her non-fiction work.

Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. Her screenplay The Last Days of Chez Nous was filmed in 1990. Garner has won many prizes, among them a Walkley Award  In 1995 she published The First Stone, a controversial account of a Melbourne University sexual harassment case. Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) was a non-fiction study of two murder trials in Canberra.

In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction and the Barbara Jefferis Award, and has been translated into many languages.

Photo: Mark Chew