Helen Bianchin

Helen was born on February 20 in New Zealand, where she grew up, an only child possessed by a vivid imagination and a love for reading. She wrotestories for amusement in her early teenage years, and when she left leaving school, she took a secretarial job at a father-and-son legal firm.

At age twenty-one Helen joined a girlfriend and embarked on a workingholiday in Australia, travelling via cruise ship from Auckland to Melbourne.Alas, no shipboard romance, as she spent all four days in her cabin suffering from sea-sickness! After fifteen months working in Melbourne,Helen and her friend bought a vehicle and took three months to drive the length and breadth of Australia, choosing to work in Cairns in order to fundthe final leg of our journey to Sydney.

It was in Cairns that Helen met her future husband, Danilo Bianchin, an Italian immigrant from Treviso. He was a tobacco sharefarmer from thetobacco farming community of Mareeba. His English was pitiful, and hercommand of Italian was nil. Six months later they married, and Helen wasflung into cooking for up to nine tobacco pickers, stringing tobacco,feeding 200 chickens, a few turkeys, ducks... plus killing, cleaning andcooking the same! Her knowledge of Italian improved, and there werehilarious moments in retrospect. Some of what she endured was cooking on awood-burning stove, having no running hot water, a primitive shower andtoilet facilities, washing uniforms for two soccer teams during the soccerseason... floods, horrendous hailstone damage to tobacco crops, hardship,and the stillbirth of their first child. Then, to their joy, Helen'sdaughter, Lucia, was born. Three years later the couple returned to NewZealand, where they settled for sixteen years. During those early years,they added two sons, Angelo and Peter, to the family.

With multiple anecdotes of farm life in an Italian community to friends, theidea of writing a book occurred. A romance, set on a tobacco farm inAustralia's far north, Queensland, featuring an Italian hero. Helen says,"the background was authentic, believe me!" However the hero was rich andowned the farm artistic license! It took her a year to complete a passablemanuscript, typed on a portable typewriter at the dining room table. Thatfirst effort was deemed too short with insufficient detail. Helen rewroteit. This time it was considered too long with too much extraneous detail.She revised, then sent it to London. Four months later she received atelegram from Alan Boon (Mills & Boon) to say they intended to publish and acontract would be sent in the mail. It was the most wonderful news!

Helen wrote ten more books while living in New Zealand, then in 1981, herfamily resettled in Australia, on Queensland's Gold Coast. She has sincepublished twenty-five more books. Today, with computer technology, themechanics of writing are much easier. However, the writing process doesn'tchange. Helen says that she's having a good day if she can achieve 5 goodpages, which she is likely to change, edit and rewrite the following day.

She loves creating characters, giving them life and providing a situationwhere their emotions are tested and love wins out. For her, the greatestpraise is for a reader to say they couldn't put the book down... then Helenknows that she has achieved what she set out to do -- "create a movingenjoyable story which holds the reader entertained from beginning to end."

Helen's hobbies are tennis, table-tennis, judo, reading. She loves movies,and leads an active social life.