Helen FitzGerald
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Helen FitzGerald (born 1966, Melbourne, Australia) is a novelist and screenwriter. She is best known for her debut novel Dead Lovely, first published by Allen & Unwin in September 2007.
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[edit] Background
FitzGerald, the twelfth of thirteen children, was brought up in the country town of Kilmore, Victoria, and moved to the UK in 1991. She started writing while working as a criminal justice social worker, latterly with serious sex offenders in Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison.
[edit] Writing
FitzGerald began as a screenwriter, producing a series of educational children's dramas for BBC Scotland. She subsequently sold a number of screenplays, but none was ultimately produced and – frustrated by the film and television industry – she turned to novel-writing.
Her first book, Dead Lovely, was completed in 2006. It was picked up by publishers Ambo/Anthos(Netherlands) and subsequently by Allen & Unwin (Australia/ New Zealand), Faber & Faber (UK), Calmann-Levy (France) and Piemme (Italy).
A follow-up novel to Dead Lovely, titled My Last Confession, is due for publication in 2009.
FitzGerald's third and fourth novels – The Devil's Staircase and Bloody Women – are due for publication in October 2008 and October 2009 respectively.
[edit] Critical reaction
Some commentators noted that FitzGerald's first book, while generally described as a crime novel, did not follow the traditional rules of the genre. They argued that it belonged to a different, more psychologically complex tradition, characterised by the dark humour and flawed anti-heroines of writers such as Tama Janowitz and Fay Weldon. Novelist Mark Abernethy wrote of FitzGerald: "She has managed to do what Fay Weldon did in The Life and Loves of a She-Devil, which is to find the joke in what appals us [1]."
Australian critic Sally Murphy described the novel as compelling but hard to classify, with "elements of chick-lit mixed with ghastly scenes of murder and retribution" [2], while Adelaide writer Cath Kenneally highlighted FitzGerald's technique of underpinning audacious and potentially shocking material - "working blue" - with "sociological acumen" [3].
