Born Helen Ford in Geelong in 1942, the eldest of six children and educated at Manifold Heights State School, Ocean Grove State School, The Hermitage Geelong and Melbourne University, Helen Garner has become one of Australia's most loved and revered authors.

Graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree with majors in English and French, Helen worked as a school teacher between '66 and '72 at several Victorian high schools. It is during this time that she met and later married Bill Garner and had her only child Alice, who is an actor and writer.

In '72 Helen was sacked from her job as a teacher for giving her 13 year old students unauthorised and unscheduled sex education lessons.

Garner was married twice more, including a marriage to Australian writer Murray Bail. She is currently not married.

In 1977 Garner released Monkey Grip which won a National Book Council award in 1978 and was made into a film in 1982. The novel about a group of welfare recipients living in shared accommodation in Melbourne, revolves around the central character Nora and her love for the drug addicted Javo. Nora's love, her habit of "giving it all away," is as addictive as Javo's heroin habit, and makes her just as vulnerable. Garner later admitted that she had adapted Monkey Grip directly from her personal diaries of the time.

In her subsequent releases, Garner continued to relate her personal experiences. Honour, and Other People's Children released in '80, is about what happens when a relationship between two women becomes fractured and eventually disintegrates. In '83 Garner released 'Moving Out', a novelisation of a screenplay.

'The Children's Bach' released in '84, concentrates on the isolation of characters and the failures of bonding, this novel depicts at least one couple in a successful relationship. "She loved him. They loved each other. They were friends." Their marriage is stable and caring despite the strains put on it by their disabled son who has a musical sense but not speech. There is a sense that characters are redefining their perspectives instead of being depicted at a stage when they are already locked into a fixed way of seeing, and surviving in, the world.

Postcards From Surfers, released in '86, is a group of short stories that concentrate on what people say when taliking about themselves to others. This was followed by Cosmo Cosmolino in '92.

The First Stone - Some Questions about Sex and Power was released in '95. This book centre's on two young women students at Melbourne University who went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The shock of these charges split the community and painfully focused the debate about sex and power.

Joe Cinque's Consolation, released in '04, tells of a clever young law student at ANU who made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests - most of them university students - had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of Rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder.

Helen returned to fiction writing in '08 with 'The Spare Room'. A perfect novel, imbued with all Garner's usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking territory, the dying friend who comes to stay, and make it not only bearable, but glorious, and humorous.