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Hearing is believing

28th November 2006 by Helena 1 Comment  

Yesterday I had the strangest experience. I was being interviewed on Radio Cumbria about Ciao Bella and they played a recording of someone reading from the book. There was atmospheric Italian music in the background and I found myself being swept away by the description of Florence. It was most odd, it didn’t seem like my book at all, it seemed to have nothing to do with the thing I created sitting at my desk, it had taken on a life of its own. I suppose writing a book is a little like having a baby. It’s all yours for a while and then it goes out into the world.

That this book made it at all is a miracle. It has had several false starts. It was the book I was always being told as a child that I would write one day. When adults heard how mad my life was (three schools in as many months, mother’s psychotic third husband beating us up, lunatic Italian father in the background whom I didn’t know, stepfather taking mother to court over custody) they would nod sympathetically and say: “One day you’ll write a book about all this” almost as if that made it all all right. When I met my husband-to-be I told him the whole saga on a four-hour boat trip on the Bosphorus River in Istanbul. His reaction was the same, but this time I actually started to write it.

About ten years and over 100 rejection letters later it still hadn’t been published. It wasn’t until I went to Italy last year, to write a book about Italian women, that I hit on the right formula for it; mixing the past with the present. It also helped that by then I had a publisher who believed in me and had already published two of my books. When I got back I told him there was good news and there was bad news. The bad news was I wasn’t going to write a book about Italian women. The good news was I was going to write something better. He took it in his stride.

So Ciao Bella, or Learning with Dante or Roma as it has also been called in its earlier inceptions was born. Which title do you prefer?


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One thought on Hearing is believing

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Helena Frith Powell was born in Sweden to a Swedish mother and Italian father, but grew up mainly in England. She is the author of eleven books, translated into several languages including Chinese and Russian. She wrote the French Mistress column The Sunday Times about life in France for several years. She is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail, Mail on Sunday, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Tatler Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar.

Helena has been the editor of four magazines, including M Magazine, a supplement for the Abu Dhabi based National Newspaper and FIVE, a high-end fashion glossy, also published in Abu Dhabi. Helena was also editor in chief of 360 Life, a quarterly glossy magazine published with the Sports 360 Newspaper in Dubai, part of the Chalhoub Group. She writes a beauty blog www.beautyorbeast.uk.

Her third novel, The Arnolfini Marriage, based on a romance that evolves around a van Eyck masterpiece came out in 2016. As well as contributing regularly for newspapers and magazines, writing short stories and studying for a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of Cambridge, Helena is also working on a thriller called The Longest Night that will be published in spring 2019. Her latest non-fiction work Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles came out in hardback in 2016 and came out in paperback in April 2018.

Helena was educated at Durham University and lived in the Languedoc region of France for eight years, where the family still have a home. She lives between there and London with her husband Rupert and their three children.

Bibliography

More France Please, we’re British; Gibson Square 2004

Two Lipsticks and a Lover 2005; Gibson Square (hardback)

All You Need to be Impossibly French; (US version of above) Penguin 2006

Two Lipsticks and a Lover; Arrow Books (paperback) 2007

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (hardback) 2006

Ciao Bella Gibson Square; (paperback) 2007

So Chic! (French version of Two Lipsticks) Leduc Editions 2008 (also translated into Chinese, Russian and Thai)

More, More France; Gibson Square 2009

To Hell in High Heels; Arrow Books 2009 (also translated into Polish)

The Viva Mayr Diet; Harper Collins 2009

Love in a Warm Climate; Gibson Square 2011

The Ex-Factor; Gibson Square 2013

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles; Gibson Square 2016

The Arnolfini Marriage; Amazon Kindle December 2016

Smart Women Don’t Get Wrinkles (paperback); Gibson Square spring 2018

The Longest Night; Gibson Square spring 2019

 

 

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