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Helen Bain

Biography

Helen Bain

Helen Bain received her PhD in creative writing from King’s College London and has master’s degrees in modern and contemporary literature and creative writing from Birkbeck, University of London. She was selected for The London Library Emerging Writers’ Program 2020–21 and The Genesis Foundation Emerging Writers’ Program 2022–23. In 2024, she won The People’s Friend Comedy Fiction Prize. Currently at the Financial Times, she has worked for British Vogue and The Guardian, and she also teaches creative writing at the university level. Helen lives in Sussex. THE DAFFODIL DAYS is her first novel.

Helen Bain

Books by Helen Bain

The Daffodil Days
by Helen Bain - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In the early 1960s in a small English town, the church bells ring. The people go about their days, catching glimpses of one another. Among all these lives, one young couple moves into focus. New to the town with their small daughter, they have escaped London for a quieter existence at Court Green, the thatched house beside the church. THE DAFFODIL DAYS depicts a pivotal year in the marriage of 20th-century literature’s most infamous couple, primarily the wife: Sylvia Plath. It is a kaleidoscopic portrait of this enigmatic writer, refracted through the rich inner lives of a rural community caught, if only for a moment, in her light. Here, Sylvia is capable and charismatic, vulnerable but strong, full of spirit. The lasting impression is not of what breaks us but what binds us: resilience, creativity and love.