Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding
Born	(1958-02-19) 19 February 1958 (age 66) Morley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England
Occupation	Journalist, novelist, screenwriter
Nationality	British
Education	St Anne's College, Oxford
Partner	Kevin Curran[1] (died 2016)
Children	2

Helen Fielding^[2] (born 19 February 1958)^[3] is British journalist, novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones. Fielding’s first novel was set in a refugee camp in East Africa and she started writing Bridget Jones in an anonymous column in London’s Independent newspaper. This turned into an unexpected hit, leading to four Bridget Jones novels, three movies, with a fourth movie announced in April 2024 for release in 2025.

Fielding credits the success of Bridget Jones to tapping into the gap between how we all feel we are expected to be and how we really are.^[4]

Fielding’s novel

From 1990 – 1999 she worked as a journalist and columnist on several national newspapers, including The Sunday Times, The Independent and The Telegraph. Her best-known work, Bridget Jones's Diary, began its life as an unattributed column in The Independent in 1995. The success of the column led to four novels and three film adaptations. Fielding was part of the scriptwriting team for all three.

Bridget Jones

Fielding's first novel, Cause Celeb was published in 1994 to great reviews but limited sales. She was struggling to make ends meet while working on her second novel, a satire about cultural divides in the Caribbean when she was approached by London's The Independent newspaper to write a column as herself about single life in London. Fielding rejected this idea as too embarrassing^[13] and exposing and offered instead to create an imaginary, exaggerated, comic character.

Writing anonymously, she felt able to be honest about the preoccupations of single women in their thirties. The column quickly acquired a following, her identity was revealed and her publishers asked her to replace her novel about the Caribbean by a novel on Bridget Jones's Diary. The hardback was published in 1996 to good reviews but modest sales. The paperback, published in 1997, went straight to the top of the best-seller chart, stayed there for over six months and went on to become a worldwide best-seller.^[14]

Fielding continued her columns in The Independent, and then The Daily Telegraph until 1997, publishing a second Bridget novel The Edge of Reason in November 1999. The film of Bridget Jones's Diary was released in 2001 and its sequel in 2004. Fielding contributed the further adventures of Bridget Jones for The Independent from 2005. Fielding announced in November 2012 that she was now writing a third instalment in the Bridget Jones series.^[15][16]

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy was published in the UK by Jonathan Cape and in the US by Alfred A. Knopf in October 2013. It debuted at number one on The Sunday Times bestseller list, and number seven on The New York Times bestseller list. By the time the UK paperback was published on 19 June 2014, sales had reached one million copies. The novel was shortlisted for the 15th Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize,^[17] nominated in the Popular Fiction category of the National Book Award.^[18] and has been translated into 32 languages.

Personal life

Fielding lives in London and also spends time in Los Angeles. She and Kevin Curran, a writer/executive producer on The Simpsons, began a relationship in 2000 and had two children. Curran died from cancer complications on 26 October 2016.^[19]

She is an Ambassador for the Yorkshire Chidren’s Charity^[20] and a longtime supporter of Save the Children.^[21] OxTales, her collection of short stories was published in aid of Oxfam in 2009

Honours

In 2014, Fielding was one of twenty writers on

• 1997 British Book of the Year
• 2002 Writers Guild of America nomination, Best Screenplay
• 2002
  BAFTA
  nomination, Best Screenplay
• 2002 Evening Standard Award Best Screenplay
• 2013 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize shortlist
• 2013 National Book Award nomination, Best Popular Fiction
• 2016 (Evening Standard) Peter Sellers Award for Comedy
• 2016 Honorary Doctorate of Literature, University of York
• 2017 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries

Bibliography

• Who's Had Who, in Association with Berk’s Rogerage, an Historical Rogister Containing Official Lay Lines of History from the Beginning of Time to the Present Day (1987; 1990 in US with first subtitle omitted) (with Simon Bell and Richard Curtis)
• Cause Celeb (1994) is a satire, based on the relationship between celebrities and refugees set in a camp in a fictional country in East Africa.
• Bridget Jones's Diary (1996)
• Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999)
• Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination (2003), a comic spy novel set in Miami, Los Angeles, England and Sudan.
• Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
  (2013)
• Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries (2016)

Short stories

• Ox-tales (2009) a collection of short stories in aid of Oxfam^[24]

Film adaptations

• Bridget Jones's Diary (2001). Starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth. Written by Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding. Directed by Sharon Maguire. Produced by Working Title Films
  .
• Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). Starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth. Written by Adam Brooks, Richard Curtis, Andrew Davies, Helen Fielding. Directed by Beeban Kidron
  . Produced by Working Title Films.
• Bridget Jones's Baby (2016) Starring Renee Zellweger, Colin Firth, Patrick Dempsey. Written by Helen Fielding, Emma Thompson, Dan Mazer, Directed by Sharon Maguire. Produced by Working Title Films.

References