Helen Garner

Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist whose first novel, Monkey Grip, appeared in 1977 and is now widely considered a classic. She often draws on her own life in her fiction, as in The Spare Room, and has written true-crime books including Joe Cinque's Consolation and This House of Grief. Her non-fiction also includes The First Stone, a look at a sexual-harassment scandal in a university college, and How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2025.