Themes īenedict's novels explore the themes of war, trauma, displacement, isolation, racism and sexism, often through the eyes of people who fall outside the predominant culture. She has received fellowships from the Freedom Forum, MacDowell, Palazzo Rinaldi in Italy, The Ragdale Foundation, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ucross, I-Park and Yaddo. She began teaching at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in 1986, where she is now a full-time professor.īenedict's works have been translated and published in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Portugal. In 1981, Benedict moved to New York, where she freelanced for five years, publishing short stories and articles in literary journals, magazines and newspapers. The anthology also contained Benedict's magazine profile of Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, Bernard Malamud and Paule Marshall.

She first began to publish in the United States that year and into the 1980s, with profiles of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, Susan Sontag and New York writer Leonard Michaels, later collected in her anthology, Portraits in Print. She worked for newspapers in both countries, and obtained her master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. Her background as a child of anthropologists has informed her work both as a novelist and a journalist.īenedict grew up partly in London, partly in California, and attended university in both England and the United States. Seychelles became the setting for Benedict's novel, The Edge of Eden. As a child, she lived in Mauritius and Seychelles, where her parents conducted fieldwork. Helen Benedict is an American novelist and journalist, best known for her writings on social injustice, the Iraq War and most recently, refugees.īenedict was born in London, England, to parents Burton Benedict and Marion Steuber Benedict who were American anthropologists. Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, novelist

The Edge of Eden by Helen Benedict