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Helen Dunmore

Born

in Yorkshire, The United Kingdom

December 12, 1952

Died

June 05, 2017

Website

http://www.helendunmore.com

Genre

Literature & Fiction, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Poetry

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I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. In a large family you hear a great many stories. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints.

Poetry was very important to me from childhood. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Writing these down came a little later.

I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language i I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. In a large family you hear a great many stories. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints.

Poetry was very important to me from childhood. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Writing these down came a little later.

I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.

At around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I also completed two novels; fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel.

During this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession.

During the 1980s and early 1990s I taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme, as well as giving readings and workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons and every other kind of place where a poem could conceivably be welcome. I also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts.

In the late 1980s I began to publish short stories, and these were the beginning of a breakthrough into fiction. What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels. My first novel for children was Going to Egypt, published in 1992, and my first novel for adults was Zennor in Darkness, published in 1993, which won the McKitterick Prize. This was also my first researched novel, set in the First World War and dealing with the period when D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived in Zennor in Cornwall, and came under suspicion as German spies.

My third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and since then I have published a number of novels, short story collections and books for children. Full details of all these books are available on this website. The last of The Ingo Quartet, The Crossing of Ingo, was published in paperback in Spring 2009.

My seventh novel, The Siege (2001) was shortlisted both for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. This was another researched novel, which grew from a lifelong love of Russian history, culture and literature. It is is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for 880 days from the fall of Mga on 30th August 1941. The Siege has been translated into Russian by Tatyana Averchina, and extracts have been broadcast on radio in St Petersburg. House of Orphans was published in 2006, and in 2008 Counting the Stars. Its central characters are the Roman poet Catullus, who lived during the last years of the Republic, ...more

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Helen Dunmore’s books

Average rating: 3.81 · 75,528 ratings · 7,519 reviews · 117 distinct works • Similar authors

	Ingo 3.95 avg rating — 10,799 ratings — published 2005	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Siege (The Siege, #1) 4.03 avg rating — 7,010 ratings — published 2001 — 48 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Exposure 3.92 avg rating — 6,025 ratings — published 2016 — 24 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Tide Knot 3.99 avg rating — 5,633 ratings — published 2006 — 38 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Birdcage Walk 3.68 avg rating — 5,829 ratings — published 2017 — 20 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Deep 4.01 avg rating — 4,942 ratings — published 2007 — 40 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Lie 3.64 avg rating — 4,323 ratings — published 2014 — 25 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Spell of Winter 3.67 avg rating — 3,941 ratings — published 1995 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Crossing of Ingo 4.10 avg rating — 3,468 ratings — published 2008 — 23 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Betrayal (The Siege #2) 4.05 avg rating — 2,878 ratings — published 2010	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Helen Dunmore…

Series by Helen Dunmore

Ingo (5 books)
by

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3.99 avg rating — 26,037 ratings

The Siege (2 books)
by

Helen Dunmore

4.04 avg rating — 9,888 ratings

Katie & Zillah (3 books)
by

Helen Dunmore

3.70 avg rating — 162 ratings

Quotes by Helen Dunmore (?)

“I wish I was away in Ingo
Far across the briny sea
Sailing over deepest waters
Where neither care nor worry trouble me.”
― helen dunmore, Ingo

70 likes

“In a world without air all you breathe is adventure!”
― Helen Dunmore

44 likes

“The human longing for story is so powerful, so primitive, that it seems like something not learned, but locked into our genes.”
― Helen Dunmore

26 likes

See all Helen Dunmore's quotes »

Polls

What award winner would you like to read for March's Group Read?

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

29 votes 23.4%

The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

20 votes 16.1%

Dune (Dune Chronicles, #1) by Frank Herbert

Dune by Frank Herbert

16 votes 12.9%

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

12 votes 9.7%

A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

11 votes 8.9%

by A Spell of Winter Helen Dunmore

10 votes 8.1%

419: A Novel by Will Ferguson

8 votes 6.5%

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor

8 votes 6.5%

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

7 votes 5.6%

Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey

3 votes 2.4%

124 total votes

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Helen Dunmore’s Followers (972)

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Helen Dunmore

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