Helen Simpson was born in Bristol and grew up in London. She read English at Oxford University, where she wrote a thesis on Restoration farce, then worked for five years as a staff writer at Vogue before becoming a freelance-writer, contributing articles to newspapers and magazines and publishing two cookery books.

Her first collection of short stories, Four Bare Legs in a Bed and Other Stories (1990), won the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Her suspense novella Flesh and Grass appeared in 1990 with Ruth Rendell's The Strawberry Tree under the general title Unguarded Hours, and she was chosen as one of Granta magazine's 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' in 1993. There followed a second volume of short stories Dear George (1995).

Her most recent book is Hey Yeah Right Get a Life (2000), a collection of loosely linked stories about modern women and motherhood, which won the Hawthornden Prize in 2001. She was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 2002 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She wrote the libretto for the jazz opera, Good Friday, 1663, screened on Channel 4 television, and the lyrics for Kate and Mike Westbrook's jazz suite Bar Utopia.

Helen Simpson is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.

To learn more about Helen Simpson, go to Contemporary Writers.