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Category: Italy

Trouble with truffles

1st November 2017

As it’s the truffle season I am posting a story I wrote about that magical ingredient set in Rome. It is inspired by one of my favourite short stories called Roman Fever by Edith Wharton. Enjoy the season!  Ruth stands on the corner of Via Margutta. It …

Coma, what coma?

15th March 2013

It all started with an email entitled ‘worried’ from my mother. No one had heard anything from my father for two days. “He’s not answering the door, or the phone,” she wrote. “The lady who lives below him hasn’t heard anything at all. And he’s locked t …

Daddy and Dante

1st August 2011

The most wonderful memory of my trip to Italy this summer is from a party that my mother had. She billed it “an evening of poetry and magic” and it was held at a friend’s house next to a river in Umbria. The magic was the atmosphere, as well as a charm …

New Year, new name….

10th January 2010

One of the results of making friends with my aunt again is that I am back in the will. I hasten to add that I am only back in the will because she tried to leave her money to my children, bypassing me, but was told they would have to pay inheritance ta …

My last day in Rome

9th December 2009

Today was our last day in Rome. It has been a glorious seven days of walking (miles and miles of walking), museums, churches, cobbled streets and pasta (industrial quantities of pasta). There have been many highlights. For example, the exhibition of Ro …

My first day in Rome by Bea

5th December 2009

I love it here it’s great . Today we are arriving in rome by train it’ gonna take us an hour to get there so wev’e arrived and we went to the taxi station and got a taxi from our appartement and we thought that it would be wonderful but when we get the …

Back in the family fold

2nd December 2009

We are in Rome, which I have decided is my favourite city. “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” Rupert told the children as we landed. “It took two days.” “That long?” said Leo. He’s obviously got too used to Abu Dhabi. The day before yesterday the unimaginab …

Running in the rain

10th August 2009

This morning I went for a run around the lake, not the whole way round, it is 18 kilometres, but for about 15 minutes. Suddenly it started pouring with rain. My instinct was to shriek and call a taxi. But then I thought; rain, there’s a novelty, let’s …

A sobering revelation

14th July 2009

I have given up drinking. Not in the way I normally give up, for a few hours every New Year, but this will be my ninth alcohol-free evening. It all started when Rupert was told by a personal trainer that he had to stop for a couple of weeks. “I’ll do i …

Life without the ferals

12th July 2009

As I write the girls are in a Gondola in Venice. My aunt has declared them “very elegant” and says they have a “frenetic timetable”. They are having a lovely time and Olivia can now say ‘che bello mare blu’ which will come in very useful. Or rather mor …

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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.

Helena contributes regularly to UK-based newspapers and magazines and holds a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Cambridge. She is working on a thriller set in Sweden as well as a novel about the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield called Sense of an Echo.

In 2022 her short story The Japanese Gardener came second in the Fish Publishing Short Story Prize. One of her stories was also shortlisted for the Bridport Short Story Prize. When she’s not writing, she works as a headhunter for the media and entertainment industry for the Sucherman Group. 

Helena, who was educated at Durham University, lives in the Languedoc region of France with her husband Rupert and their three children.

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