Helena Attlee is a
non-fiction author who has specialised in garden writing.
She makes her approach to the subject through cultural
history and the biographies of the people connected with
the gardens that she writes about. She has always made
Italy her special subject and her most recent book on its
gardens – Italian
Gardens: a Cultural History –was published by Frances
Lincoln in 2006. As a graduate in Italian she was able to
bring much new material to a familiar subject. The book was
widely and well reviewed and has taken its place on the
reading lists at various universities, including Birkbeck
at the University of London and NYU in America. In 2008
Frances Lincoln published The
Gardens of Portugal, another critical success, now
also published in Portuguese. 2009 has seen the publication
of The
Gardens of Wales by Frances Lincoln, already
selling well, and Charles
Latham’s Gardens of Italy, illustrated by Latham’s
photographs taken in 1903, and published by Aurum Press. A
book on the gardens of Japan will be published in 2010, and
she is currently working on a new book about private
gardens in Italy and the people who live and work in them.
She also contributes articles about architecture, interiors
and gardens – of course – to numerous magazines,
including Country
Life, The
Saturday Telegraph Magazine and The
World of Interiors.
Helena is a fellow
of the Royal Literary Fund and will be writer in residence
at the University of Worcester for 2009-2010. She lectures
both at home and abroad on a broad spectrum of subjects
within garden history. She is a visiting lecturer on the
garden history MA course at Birkbeck. She lectures
regularly to a number of professional and non-professional
groups, has appeared twice at the Hay Literary Festival,
and also at the Oxford and Rye literary festivals. She
works with Boxwood Tours to design and lead lecture tours
to gardens in Italy, Portugal and Britain. Together with
David Wheeler of Hortus
she started the
highly successful Hortus Tours. Helena lives on the Welsh
borders with three daughters and her partner the
photographer Alex Ramsay, who has illustrated many
of her books and articles.