Helen Dunmore was a renowned author, born in December 1952 in Beverley, Yorkshire. She was the second of four children in a large family, which had a significant influence on her life and work. Her father was the eldest of twelve children, and this extended family background provided her with a wealth of stories and different perspectives from an early age. Dunmore's love for poetry began in childhood, and she started writing her own poems using the forms she had learned.
Dunmore studied English at the University of York and later taught English as a foreign language in Finland. During this time, she began writing the poems that formed her first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and published them in magazines. She also completed two novels, although none of them have survived. In the 1980s, Dunmore started publishing poetry collections and some of the short stories that were later collected in Love of Fat Men. She traveled extensively for poetry tours and writing residences, which significantly impacted her work. Dunmore also reviewed poetry and fiction for various publications, including The Observer, The Times, and The Guardian.
Dunmore's critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women, and introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession. During the 1980s and early 1990s, Dunmore taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation, and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme. She also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department, and for the Open College of the Arts.
Dunmore's first novel for children, Going to Egypt, was published in 1992, and her first novel for adults, Zennor in Darkness, was published in 1993, which won the McKitterick Prize. Her third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. The Siege, published in 2001, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. The novel is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for 880 days. Dunmore's last novel, Birdcage Walk, was published in 2017, and she passed away in June of the same year at the age of 64 due to cancer.