Helen is a Scot who taught infants in her homeland, Canada and England before spending a couple of years in the early nineteen-eighties in Nigeria with her husband and two young children. On their return to the UK her husband began to work as an independent consultant, so Helen took typing and computing classes to equip her to act as his secretary.

All her life her brain had swarmed with characters, desperate to tell their stories. Having learned to type she began to write those stories down. She joined "Cambridge Writers" where, several successes in short story competitions gave her the courage to embark on longer prose - she had been toying with ideas for a Scottish historical novel for several years. In 2003 she entered the first draft in the National Association of Writers’ Groups competition for unpublished novels. Thrilled to receive a runner up certificate, she stuffed that manuscript into a drawer and embarked on another novel.

A dozen years on, with another three draft novels in the drawer, she was inspired by the upcoming anniversaries of the First World War and women being granted the vote to revisit the first novel and edit it with a view to publication. The result is “Worlds Apart”, a story of friendship, love and loyalty in turbulent times.