24 Facts About Helen Garner

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.

Helen Garner has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels Monkey Grip and The Spare Room.

Helen Garner has written for film and theatre, and has consistently won awards for her work, including the Walkley Award for a 1993 Time magazine report.

Helen Garner's works have covered a broad range of themes and subject matter.

Helen Garner's sister Catherine Ford is a writer of fiction.

Helen Garner attended Manifold Heights State School, Ocean Grove State School and then The Hermitage in Geelong, where she was the head prefect and dux.

Helen Garner left Geelong after her high school graduation at the age of 18 to study at the University of Melbourne, residing at Janet Clarke Hall, and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in English and French.

Between 1966 and 1972, Helen Garner worked as a teacher at various Victorian high schools.

Helen Garner's only child, the actor, musician and writer Alice Garner, was born in 1969.

Helen Garner had written an essay about the lesson and published it under a pen name in The Digger, a countercultural Melbourne-based magazine.

Helen Garner appeared in the 1975 independent film Pure Shit, which focuses on four drug addicts searching for heroin in Melbourne.

Helen Garner came to prominence at a time when Australian writers were relatively few in number, and Australian women writers were, by some, considered a novelty.

Australian academic and writer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, writes that "From the beginning of her writing career Helen Garner was regarded as, and frequently called, a stylist, a realist, and a feminist".

Helen Garner has written three screenplays: Monkey Grip, written with and directed by Ken Cameron; Two Friends, directed by Jane Campion for TV; and The Last Days of Chez Nous, directed by Gillian Armstrong.

Helen Garner has written non-fiction from the beginning of her career as a writer.

Helen Garner wrote for this magazine from 1972 to 1974.

Helen Garner received hate-mail from women in Australia who accused her of derailing the feminist debate, and closing ranks with the abuser.

Helen Garner contributed to La Mama, the Story of a Theatre.

Helen Garner has covered a broad range of themes in her work, including feminism, love, loss, grief, ageing, illness, death, murder, betrayal, addiction and the duality of the human psyche, particularly in manifestations of "good" and "evil".

Drug addiction was not a subject Helen Garner revisited, aside from touching on recreational drug use among university students in Joe Cinque's Consolation.

Craven comments that Helen Garner is "always an extremely accurate writer in terms of the emotional states she depicts".

James Wood, in a profile on Helen Garner published in The New Yorker, stated that her work is absorbed in issues of gender and class, which he writes are "not categories so much as structures of feeling, variously argued over, enjoyed, endured, and escaped".

Alice Helen Garner is an author, as well as a musician, teacher and historian.

In 2003, a portrait of Helen Garner, titled True Stories, painted by Jenny Sages, was a finalist in the Archibald Prize.