Helen Garner (née Ford,[1] born 7 November 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.

Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene—it is now widely considered a classic.

[2] She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008).

Adaptations of two of her works have appeared as feature films: her debut novel, Monkey Grip, and her true-crime book Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004)—the former released in 1982 and the latter in 2016.

She has written three true-crime books: The First Stone, about the aftermath of a sexual-harassment scandal at a university, Joe Cinque's Consolation, a journalistic novel about the court proceedings involving a young man who died at the hands of his girlfriend, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Book, and, in 2014, This House of Grief, about Robert Farquharson, a man who drove his children into a dam.

Garner wrote that she had intended to give a lesson on Ancient Greece, but the textbooks given to her students had been defaced with sexually explicit drawings.

The novel, set in inner-city Melbourne suburbs Fitzroy and Carlton, was written in the domed reading room at the State Library of Victoria, after Garner's teaching dismissal.

[8] Goldsworthy suggests that the success of Monkey Grip may well have helped revive the careers of two older but largely ignored Australian women writers, Jessica Anderson and Thea Astley.

[23] Critics have retrospectively applied the term grunge lit to describe Monkey Grip, citing its depiction of urban life and social realism as key aspects of later works in the subgenre.

[25] She has also published several short-story collections: Honour & Other People's Children: Two Stories (1980), Postcards from Surfers (1985) and My Hard Heart: Selected Fictions (1998).

In 1986, Australian academic and critic Don Anderson wrote of The Children's Bach: "There are four perfect short novels in the English language.

A novel is made up of scraps of our own lives and bits of other people's, and things we think of in the middle of the night and whole notebooks full of randomly collected details".

Craven, though, argues that her novella The Children's Bach "should put paid to the myth of Helen Garner as a mere literalist or reporter",[31] arguing, in fact, that it "is light-years away from any sprawling-tell-it-all naturalism, [that] it is concentrated realism of extraordinary formal polish and the amount of tonal variation which it gets from its seemingly simple plot is multifoliate to the point of being awesome".

[33] Critic Peter Craven writes that "Two Friends is arguably the most accomplished piece of screenwriting the country has seen and it is characterised by a total lack of condescension towards the teenage girls at its centre".

Garner has covered a broad range of themes in her work, including feminism, love, loss, grief, ageing, illness, death, murder, betrayal, addiction and the duality of the human psyche, particularly in manifestations of "good" and "evil".

Its central character, a single mother, falls in love with an addict in an inner-city bohemian Melbourne suburb, dotted with junkies and share houses, during the 1970s.

[41] Some of her novels address "sexual desire and the family",[42] exploring "the relationship between sexual behaviour and social organisation; the anarchic nature of desire and the orderly force of the institution of 'family'; the similarities and differences between collective households and nuclear families; the significance and the language of housework; [and] the idea of 'the house' as image, symbol, site and peace.

[44] Joe Cinque's Consolation, This House of Grief and, to a lesser extent, The First Stone were commentaries on the justice system in Australia, how (and if) it adequately responds to crime, and the question of culpability.

In The Fate of The First Stone, Garner writes that she believes most people would prefer to keep incomprehensible stories of extreme behaviour at "arm's length" because it is "more comfortable, easier".

[47] Similarly, various critics and journalists have highlighted Garner's portrayal of "ordinary people" caught up in extraordinary experiences, or the everyday person who, "under life's unbearable pressures", has "surrendered to their darker selves".

[48][49] James Wood, in a profile on Garner published in The New Yorker, stated that her work is absorbed in issues of gender and class, which he writes are "not categories so much as structures of feeling, variously argued over, enjoyed, endured, and escaped".

[54] In October 2023, John Powers, NPR's pop culture critic, described the Garner as "This Australian writer might be the greatest novelist you've never heard of", noting in particular The Children's Bach, and This House of Grief.