25 Facts About Helen Dale

Helen Dale was born on Helen Darville; 1972 and is an Australian writer and lawyer.

Helen Dale is best known for writing The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in The Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko.

Helen Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner.

Helen Dale later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh.

Helen Dale returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.

Helen Dale had previously claimed that her father was Ukrainian, and her mother was Irish.

Helen Dale is part of German anti-partisan activity in the wake of Italy's withdrawal from the Axis alliance.

The book is frank about the antisemitism of its major characters, and Helen Dale represented the lives of Ukrainian military men in a sympathetic manner, rather than featuring their victims as is more usual in Holocaust literature.

When Helen Dale submitted her novel to the University of Queensland Press in 1993, she said it was based upon recorded interviews with her own relatives, among others her uncle "Vitaly Demidenko".

In 1995, Helen Dale published a short story, "Pieces of the Puzzle", in the Australian culture journal Meanjin.

Helen Dale has said that she had met Ukrainian witnesses to the war and the Holocaust, and based the story on their accounts.

Helen Dale was briefly a columnist with the Brisbane daily newspaper The Courier-Mail.

Helen Dale was dismissed for accusations of plagiarism after repeating jokes originally from the 'Evil Overlord List' in one of her columns and passing them off as her own.

Helen Dale continued to write freelance features for other News Corporation newspapers and magazines, and occasionally the Fairfax press.

In 2017, an investigation by BuzzFeed revealed that Helen Dale had plagiarised a number of social media posts in her Twitter and Facebook feeds.

In 2000, Helen Dale was again accused of antisemitism after interviewing David Irving, a Holocaust denier, for Australian Style magazine during his libel trial in London.

Since gaining her law degree, Helen Dale has appeared on the SBS program Insight, and as a guest of the University of Melbourne's Publishing and Communications Program.

Helen Dale is associated with the Australian Skeptics, and has written for both their in-house magazine and Quadrant, a conservative journal.

In 2007 Helen Dale was reported to be working on a second novel.

Helen Dale completed the Bachelor of Civil Law programme at the University of Oxford, where she was a member of Brasenose College.

Helen Dale completed a Graduate LLB degree at the University of Edinburgh School of Law in 2012.

Helen Dale completed a post-graduate qualification before beginning work in 2013 as a trainee solicitor with the law firm MBM Commercial.

Helen Dale is reported to have worked variously as a graphic designer, property law lecturer, and physical education teacher.

In 2014, Helen Dale returned to Australia, becoming a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate.

Helen Dale's most recent work is a two-part novel titled Kingdom of the Wicked.