Helen Fielding

British · born 1958

Born Helen Fielding on February 19, 1958, in Morley, a West Yorkshire textile town near Leeds, she grew up next door to the factory her father managed, which produced cloth for miners' donkey jackets. She was educated at Wakefield Girls' High School and read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, performing with the Oxford Revue at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival. After graduating in 1979 she joined the BBC, working her way from a regional researcher on Nationwide to a producer and director on entertainment programs; in 1985 she produced and directed the first Comic Relief broadcast, a live satellite link from a refugee camp in eastern Sudan, and continued reporting from Africa for the charity in the years that followed. That reporting fed her first novel, Cause Celeb (1994), a satire of celebrity aid work set in an East African refugee camp. In 1995, asked by an editor at The Independent to write a personal column, she found writing directly about her own life too exposing and invented a single Londoner named Bridget Jones instead, publishing the diary anonymously to readers who assumed the woman confessing her weight and cigarette count each week was real. Bridget Jones's Diary followed in 1996, its plot borrowed, by Fielding's own account, from Pride and Prejudice, which was airing on television as she wrote it; she named her hero Mark Darcy after Colin Firth's performance as Mr Darcy, and Firth was later cast to play him on screen. The novel and its 1999 sequel, The Edge of Reason, sold millions of copies and were adapted into a run of films starring Renee Zellweger that continued into 2025. She has since published Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003) and two further Bridget Jones novels, Mad About the Boy (2013) and Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries (2016), the second of which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction. Her longtime partner, the television writer Kevin Curran, died of cancer in 2016. She now divides her time between London and Los Angeles.