Helen Dale

Helen Dale (born Helen Darville; 1972) 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, Dale was educated at Redeemer Lutheran College in Rochedale, a suburb of Brisbane. While studying English literature at the University of Queensland, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript.

Dale published her book in 1994 and won the Miles Franklin Award, becoming the award's youngest winner. The following year, she was the subject of a major Australian literary controversy because she had falsely claimed Ukrainian ancestry as part of the basis of the book (and her pseudonym).^[1] The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax"^[2] in The Sydney Morning Herald.^[3] The novel was subsequently reissued under her legal name, then Helen Darville. It won the 1995 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal.

After teaching, Dale returned to university, gaining her law degree in 2002. She later did post-graduate law study at Oxford and completed an LLB degree in 2012 at the University of Edinburgh. She returned to Australia and became a senior adviser to David Leyonhjelm, a Liberal Democrat member of the Australian Senate, but at the end of May 2016 Leyonhjelm revealed that Dale had left his employ.^[4]