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Helen Fielding

English novelist and screenwriter

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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.

Fielding's novel Bridget Jones's Diary became a global bestseller, published in more than 40 countries. Fielding continued to chronicle Bridget’s life in the novels Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones’s Baby: the Diaries and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy all of which became international bestsellers.

The films chronicling these adventures – Bridget Jones’s Diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget Jones’s Baby and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – were all successful commercially.

In a 2004 poll for the BBC, Fielding was named the 29th most influential person in British culture. In December 2016, the BBC's Woman's Hour included Bridget Jones as one of the seven women who had most influenced British female culture over the last seven decades. Bridget was the only fictional woman included.

Biography

Fielding grew up in Morley, West Yorkshire, a textile town on the outskirts of Leeds in the north of England. Her father was managing director of a textile factory, next door to the family home, that produced cloth for miners' donkey jackets. He died in 1982 and her mother, Nellie, remained in Yorkshire, dying in 2021.

Fielding attended Wakefield Girls' High School, one of the private grammar schools in the Wakefield Grammar School Foundation. She has three siblings.

Fielding read English at St Anne's College, Oxford, and was part of The Oxford Revue at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival.

Fielding began work at the BBC in 1979 as a regional researcher on the news magazine Nationwide. She progressed to working as a production manager and director on various entertainment shows. In 1985, Fielding produced and directed a live satellite broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan for the launch of Comic Relief. She also wrote and produced documentaries in Africa for the first two Comic Relief fundraising broadcasts. In 1989, she was a researcher for an edition of the Thames TV This Week series "Where Hunger is a Weapon" about the Southern Sudan rebel war. These experiences formed the basis for her debut novel, Cause Celeb.

From 1990 to 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 four film adaptations. Fielding was part of the screenwriting team for all four.

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