Helen Simpson
Helen Simpson is an English novelist and short story writer. She was born in 1959 in Bristol, in the West of England, and went to a girls' school. She worked at Vogue for five years before her success in writing short stories meant she could afford to leave and concentrate full-time on her writing. Her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories, won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award while her book Hey Yeah Right Get A Life, a series of interlinked stories, won the Hawthornden Prize.
In 1993, she was selected as one of Granta's top 20 novelists under the age of 40.
In 2009, she donated the short story The Tipping Point to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales' project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Her story was published in the 'Air' collection.
“Tea at the Ritz is the last delicious morsel of Edwardian London. The light is kind, the cakes are frivolous and the tempo is calm, confident and leisurely.”
“Then I reached down into myself and managed to say, 'you should celebrate, your birthday should be celebrated, because the world's a better place with you in it.' May you continue to pile on the years, but with more pleasure from now on.”
“The nearest I have to a rule is a Post-It on the wall in front of my desk saying “Faire et se taire” (Flaubert), which I translate for myself as “Shut up and get on with it.”