Helen Sword, PhD
Helen Sword is a poet, scholar, master teacher, and international expert on academic, professional, and creative writing across the disciplines. Her books, articles, and online tools have empowered writers around the world to write more clearly, confidently, prolifically, and with greater pleasure.
Born and raised in Southern California, Helen received her PhD in comparative literature from Princeton University and is a former Professor of Humanities at the University of Auckland. She now runs a private writing consultancy, WriteSpace Limited, and offers online workshops, masterclasses, and retreats for writers of all levels and genres. She is also the founder of the WriteSPACE, a virtual writing community with writers in 30+ countries.
Helen is the author of books including Stylish Academic Writing (Harvard UP, 2012), The Writer’s Diet (Chicago UP, 2016), Air & Light & Time and Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017), and Writing with Pleasure (Princeton 2023). She is also the creator of popular digital resources including Zombie Nouns, a TedEd video that has received more than one million views on YouTube.
Helen is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and has been honored with a number of research and teaching awards, including the University of Auckland's 2007 Teaching Excellence Award for Innovation in Teaching, the 2013 HERDSA-TERNZ Medal for a scholar who has made a major impact on the tertiary education research environment of New Zealand, and the University of Auckland's 2017 Research Excellence Award. Her evidence-based writing workshops and presentations have taken her to more than 1oo universities, research institutes, and other organizations on every continent except Antarctica. She now specializes in facilitating experiential online workshops, masterclasses, and retreats that bring together writers from across the globe in a shared virtual writing space.
Newsletter
Helen’s Word (free weekly news and inspiration)
Websites
The Writer's Diet (sentence diagnostics)
The Writing BASE (productivity tool)
The Stoneflower Path (digital poetry)
BOOKS
Helen’s latest book Writing with Pleasure (Princeton UP, 2023) is now available to purchase.
See also: Helen Sword's profile at the University of Auckland