Helen was born and grew up in a small town called Weymouth, on the south coast of England. Her family was from Wales, and she inherited from them a love of stories.

As a child, she spent a lot of time either reading or writing and illustrating stories. From the age of about six she started making books with her own stories and pictures in them (and even a monthly magazine for witches, called WHOOSH). She took this very seriously, and if you’d asked her at the time what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said “an author.”

In the end, she didn’t become an author – at least, not straight away. She went to Newcastle University in the north of England to study French and Spanish, and in between being a student there she spent time in France, Spain and Cuba, where she learned to dance salsa and once queued for 4 hours for an ice-cream. After graduating, she trained as a secondary school teacher and headed out to Mexico City with an open ticket and no job. Luckily, she found a job teaching French in an International school, and ended up staying in Mexico for four years, before returning to the UK to do a Masters in Film and Television Production at Bristol University. After a lot of fun helping young people in Bristol make films (but not making much money), she returned to teaching for a few years, working with refugees and asylum seekers and then teaching Spanish at the University of the West of England.

During this time, she met Thomas Docherty, who had recently started illustrating his own books. It was Tom who encouraged her to start writing stories again, and they co-wrote the book Ruby Nettleship and the Ice Lolly Adventure (Templar, 2010).

In the summer of 2011 she wrote her first ever rhyming story, The Snatchabook (Alison Green Books, 2013).

She and Tom got married in 2008 and now live in Swansea, Wales, with their two daughters and a dog called Tesni (who looks a lot like Lynley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary).

Looking back, she’s glad that she ended up learning languages, living abroad and working for many years as a teacher (and, very briefly, film producer)… before she finally became an author!

Nowadays, she loves going into schools to tell stories to children and inspire them to write stories of their own. Working with Thomas Docherty through Storyopolis