Helen Benedict

Biography

Benedict was born in London, England, to parents who were American anthropologists. As a child, she lived in Mauritius and Seychelles, where her parents conducted fieldwork. Seychelles became the setting for Benedict’s novel, The Edge of Eden. Her background as a child of anthropologists has informed her work both as a novelist and a journalist.

Benedict grew up partly in London, partly in California, and attended university in both England and the United States. She worked for newspapers in both countries, and obtained her master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979. She first began to publish in the United States that year and into the 1980s, with profiles of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer and New York writer Leonard Michaels, later collected in her anthology, Portraits in Print. The anthology also contained Benedict’s magazine profiles of Susan Sontag, Joseph Brodsky, Bernard Malamud and Paule Marshall.

In 1981, Benedict moved to New York, where she freelanced for five years, publishing short stories and articles in literary journals, magazines and newspapers. She began teaching at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1986, where she is now a full-time professor.

Benedict’s works have been translated and published in Italy, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Portugal. 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, and Yaddo.

Themes

Benedict’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 written of Iraqi refugees and war veterans in her recent novel Sand Queen. Other subjects she has covered include: Dominican American immigrants, Greek peasants, mixed-race teenagers, former convicts and the descendants of slaves. Many of these themes are evident in her novel, The Edge of Eden, which is set in 1960 in the colonial islands of Seychelles.

Benedict's most recent and sixth novel, Sand Queen, was published in 2011 by Soho Press and in paperback in July 2012. The Boston Globe praised the novel, calling it "'The Things They Carried for women in Iraq". Robert Olen Butler wrote on its cover, "Every war eventually yields works of art which transcend politics and history and illuminate our shared humanity. Helen Benedict’s brilliant new novel has done just that with this century’s American war in Iraq. SAND QUEEN is an important book by one our finest literary artists.” Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge featured an interview with Benedict about Sand Queen, calling it one of "this year’s best new novels about war."

The material for Sand Queen came from Benedict's research for her 2009 nonfiction book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women in Iraq. In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict describes the experiences of female troops fighting in the Iraq War and their abuse at the hands of their male comrades. The Lonely Soldier received the Ken Book Award in 2009.

Benedict's writings on women at war inspired the award winning 2012 documentary, The Invisible War, and an ongoing lawsuit against the Pentagon on behalf of service members who were sexually assaulted in the military.

Benedict's nonfiction books have concentrated on the field of sexual assault and abuse of women. Her most influential nonfiction books have been The Lonely Soldier (Beacon Press, 2009) and Virgin or Vamp: How The Press Covers Sex Crimes, (Oxford University Press, 1992).

A play Benedict wrote based on her interviews with women soldiers, The Lonely Soldier Monologues, was also produced in 2009, at two New York theaters, The Theater for the New City and La Mama Experimental Theatre Club, where it was reviewed by The New York Times. An article Benedict wrote on the same subject, "The Private War of Women Soldiers, " won the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism in 2008. In 2010, her article "The Scandal of Military Rape" won the EMMA Award for Exceptional Magazine Story.

For her writings on soldiers and war, Benedict was the 2013 Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and was named one of the 21 Leaders of the 21st Century by Women's E-News.

Fiction

Non fiction

Selected articles

Selected anthologies