Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria in 1942, and grew up there with five younger siblings. She studied Arts at the University of Melbourne, graduating with Honours in English and French in 1965. She worked as a secondary school teacher until 1972, when she was dismissed, amid controversy, by the Victorian Education Department for answering her students' questions about sex. Obliged by this sudden reversal to write for a living, she has continued ever since to work as a freelance feature writer (and occasional reviewer of film and theatre) for various major Australian newspapers and magazines.
Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), won the National Book Council Award - the first of several awards for her work - and was later adapted for cinema (1982). Her subsequent books include novels (The Children's Bach, 1980; Cosmo Cosmolino,1992), novellas (Honour & Other people's Children, 1980), short stories (Postcards from Surfers, 1985; My Hard Heart: Selected Short Fiction, 1998) and screenplays (The Last Days of Chez Nous and Two Friends 1992). All her fiction is contemporary in setting and in its accounts of the struggle to find decency, love and spiritual meaning in modern urban existence.
In the 1990s Garner investigated a sexual harassment case at Ormond College at Melbourne University. Her book about the case, The First Stone (1995), was a highly controversial and much-discussed best-seller, provoking a spate of conflicting public responses. Her subsequent publication, True Stories (1996), collects her essays and journalism written over 25 years, including the Walkley Award-winning piece Killing Daniel.
In 2001 she published a second non-fiction collection, The Feel of Steel, in which journalistic essays are arranged to constitute personal memoir. For more information and criticism see particularly Kerryn Goldsworthy's book Helen Garner (OUP 1996).
(Biography reviewed and amended slightly by the Author (08/10/2001)).