Helen Dale

Helen Dale, born Helen Darville, is an Australian writer and lawyer. She is best known for writing The Hand That Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who collaborated with the Nazis in the Holocaust, under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko. A daughter of British immigrants, she was born in 1972. She wrote The Hand That Signed the Paper while studying English literature at the University of Queensland, and the award-winning novel became the subject of controversy. She later took a law degree in 2005 and postgraduate law study at Oxford, and completed an LLM at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. She is a lawyer as well as a writer, and her first novel was written while she was a student.