Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips is the author of five books, including, most recently, the novel The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019), which was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her collection Some Possible Solutions received the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. Her novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat, a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, was a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the L.A. Times Book Prize. She is the recipient of the Italo Calvino Prize. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the New York Times, and Tin House, and on Selected Shorts. Helen is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim fellowship in fiction and is an associate professor at Brooklyn College.

The Value of Support

"Receiving the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award profoundly changed my life on a logistical, financial level: I was able to ease up on my intense work schedule and give more of my energy to my writing. It also profoundly changed my life on an emotional, creative level: I was emboldened to continue on this writing path, to be as weird as I needed to be in my work, to face down the moments of struggle and rejection and self-doubt."