Helen Fielding is a British novelist and screenwriter. She is most well-known for penning the Bridget Jones Diary series.
Fielding was born in 1958 and raised in West Yorkshire and studied English at Oxford. Out of college, she originally worked for the BBC (as a researcher and then production manager) and she would later help write and produce documentaries on Africa and famine.
Fielding made a move in 1990 towards journalism, writing columns for The Sunday Times and The Telegraph. It was writing these columns that helped inspire her to write Bridget Jones’s Diary.
She has published three series of Bridget Jones’s Diary. The first was released in 1996, the second in 1999 and the third was in 2013. Each book is written from the diary perspective of Bridget Jones, a thirty-something single woman living in London. The novels deal with dating, family and (eventually) falling in love.
The books, which are partially inspired by Pride & Prejudice had enormous commercial success. The first sold over 2 million copies. In total, the books have been released in forty countries.
A film adaption was made of the first two books, starring Renée Zellweger as Bridget and Hugh Grant and Colin Firth as her love interests. The first Bridget Jones film was released in 2001 and made almost 300 million dollars in the box office. The sequel, released three years later, brought in over 260 million dollars. There has not been a confirmation yet if the third will be made into a film as well.
Books by Helen Fielding: