Helen Daniel

Editor& Literary Critic, Australian Book Review

Author

Born 6th July, 1946 - Died 16th October, 2000

Helen attended CHS from 1958 - 1963

Helen Daniel, author and literary critic, was born in Woodend, Victoria.

At Camberwell, she was a school prefect and won a number of awards, exhibitions and scholarships. She completed a Bachelor of Arts and a Diploma of Education at the University of Melbourne and then worked as a secondary teacher in Victorian high schools from 1965 to 1975. In 1975, Helen resigned from teaching to write a Ph.D. thesis on post-War Australian fiction, which was completed at the University of Melbourne in 1979.

After publishing a number of articles in Australian and overseas literary journals, Helen Daniel began regular reviewing for The Age in 1980 and, later, other newspapers. Helen was a judge of literary awards, including The Age Book of the Year Awards, the NBC Banjo Awards, the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards; a member of the Victorian Premier's Literary Awards Committee (1989-1990), a member of the assessment panel of the Literature Board of the Australia Council (1989) and a member of the programming committee of the Melbourne Festival (1989 -1991). Helen was also a secondhand bookseller in Melbourne and continued to write reviews and literary criticism for newspapers and journals.

(This photo of Helen was taken by Virginia Wallace-Crabbe during Canberra Writer's Week 1995 - and is reproduced here by permission of the National Library of Australia)

Helen had in excess of 200 book reviews published in The Age, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times, The Sunday Herald, The Australian Book Review, Overland and The Age Monthly Review and had written occasional radio reviews for the ABC.

In 1988-89 she appeared on the SBS Bookshow programme. She also wrote some thirty critical articles mainly on contemporary Australian fiction, and published in Australian and overseas journals: Westerly, Australian Literary Studies, Southerly, Overland, Modern Fiction Studies, Antipodes, All Asia Review of Books, Ariel and The Age Monthly Review. Helen also contributed to International Writers in English (ed. Robert Ross, Garland, New York, 1991).

Helen was the author of two major works of literary criticism:

Double Agent: David Ireland and His Work (Penguin, 1982) and

Liars: Australian New Novelists (Penguin, 1988), and she edited the following anthologies:

Expressway (Penguin, 1989) a collection of stories by Australian writers based on the Jeffrey Smart painting, Cahill Expressway,

The Good Reading Guide (McPhee Gribble, 1989) an anthology by 100 critics on recent Australian fiction and

Millennium, a collection of time-pieces by Australian writers, both fiction and non-fiction, published by Penguin in August, 1991. One project included a critical work on contemporary Australian fiction entitled Dark Cat: A Counterfeit Literary History, published by McPhee Gribble in 1992.

Debs - There are two webpages with beautiful obituaries that I would recommend:

Peter Craven's: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Nov00/pc.html

Inga Clendinnen's: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~abr/Nov00/ic.html