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.
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.
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. She is a Bestseller in Holland and Germany.
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).
"The Devil's staircase" was published in 2009, Polygon.
Helen's third novel was "My Last Confession", 2009 Faber & Faber.
The fourth novel, "Bloody Women" also came out in 2009, Polygon.
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 Authorsites.co.uk : Dead Lovely."
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" Book Review: Dead Lovely, by Helen Fitzgerald, while Adelaide writer Cath Kenneally highlighted FitzGerald's technique of underpinning audacious and potentially shocking material - "working blue" - with "sociological acumen" The Adelaide Review : Archives.