[close] Helen Fielding (born 19 February 1958 in Morley, West Yorkshire) is an English author, best known as the author of the novel Bridget Jones's Diary (winner of the 1998 British Book of the Year award) and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason. In 2003, she was listed in The Observer as one of the 50 funniest acts in British comedy.

Olivia Joules and The Overactive Imagination, a spoof on the spy genre, was published in 2004.

The Bridget Jones books had their origins in a column published in The Independent and The Daily Telegraph in 1997 and 1998. In 2005, she resumed her Bridget Jones column at the Independent. Bridget becomes pregnant and has a baby in this series, but love and commitment remain elusive.

In her early years, she attended Wakefield Girls High School in Wakefield, England. Fielding graduated from St. Anne's College, University of Oxford with an English degree, and worked in television journalism for several years, including a stint as a researcher on Noel Edmonds's The Late, Late Breakfast Show in the mid-1980s,[1:] before writing her first novel, Cause Celeb. She was for a time the girlfriend of screenwriter Richard Curtis, who went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and the Blackadder series. The director of the film adaptation of Bridget Jones's Diary, Sharon Maguire, appeared in the column/book as one of Bridget's friends, 'Shazzer'. Fielding also remains close friends with the writer Nick Hornby.

In February 2004, she gave birth to her first child, a boy named Dashiell Michael, with longtime boyfriend Kevin Curran, a writer for The Simpsons. Their second child, a daughter, was born on 16 July 2006. In the early 2000s, Fielding appeared in The Simpsons' episode "A Star Is Born-Again" as herself. [close]