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Helen Smith

Biography

Helen Smith

Helen Smith is a British writer and scholar. She earned her PhD in literature from the University of East Anglia, where she is a lecturer in modern literature and the director of the master’s program in biography and creative nonfiction. She has won the Biographers’ Club Prize and the RSL Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction, and lives in South Norfolk with her husband. AN UNCOMMON READER is her first book.

Helen Smith

Books by Helen Smith

An Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, Mentor and Editor of Literary Genius
by Helen Smith - Biography, History, Nonfiction

During the course of a career spanning half a century, Edward Garnett --- editor, critic and reader for hire --- would become one of the most influential men in 20th-century English literature. Known for his incisive criticism and unwavering conviction in matters of taste, Garnett was responsible for identifying and nurturing the talents of a generation of the greatest writers in the English language, from Joseph Conrad to John Galsworthy, Henry Green to Edward Thomas, T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence. In AN UNCOMMON READER, Helen Smith brings to life Garnett’s intimate and at times stormy relationships with those writers.