Helen Fielding[2] (born 19 February 1958)[3] is a British journalist, novelist and screenwriter, best known as the creator of the fictional character Bridget Jones.

Fielding’s first novel was set in a refugee camp in East Africa and she started writing Bridget Jones in an anonymous column in London’s Independent newspaper.

In her review for the New York Times, Sarah Lyall called the novel “sharp and humorous” and said that Fielding had “allowed her heroine to grow up into someone funnier and more interesting than she was before.” The movie Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, released in 2025, has Renee Zellweger reprising her role as Bridget Jones for the fourth time.

The movie is based on Fielding’s novel and original screenplay, further developed by a team including writers Dan Mazer and Abi Morgan.

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.

Her father was managing director of a textile factory, next door to the family home, that produced cloth for miners' donkey jackets.

In 1985, Fielding produced and directed a live satellite broadcast from a refugee camp in Eastern Sudan for the launch of Comic Relief.

Fielding rejected this idea as too embarrassing[11] and exposing, and offered instead to create an imaginary, exaggerated, ironically comic character.

[12] Fielding continued her columns in The Independent, and then The Daily Telegraph until 1997, publishing a second Bridget novel The Edge of Reason in November 1999.

The novel was shortlisted for the 15th Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize,[15] nominated in the Popular Fiction category of the National Book Award.

Bridget Jones Diary, was directed by Sharon Maguire, with the screenplay developed by Fielding, Andrew Davies and Richard Curtis.