At the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau we are thrilled to represent acclaimed women who motivate and inspire audiences across the globe. From bestselling authors and award-winning actors, to women’s rights activists and pioneering doctors, our speakers believe in their causes and take audiences with them on their mission.

 

Helen Simonson

International bestseller and community reads programs favorite

credit: Nina Subin

International bestseller and community reads programs favorite Helen Simonson brings her humor and insight to audiences around the country in her lectures to literary societies, libraries, universities, and professional conferences.

Helen Simonson is an Englishwoman who spent her early years in a tiny village in East Sussex. She has been a U.S. resident for over twenty years and lives in New York with her American husband and her two sons. A graduate of the London School of Economics and former travel advertising executive, she recently completed her MFA at Stony Brook Southampton. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Southampton Review, North Atlantic Review, The East Hampton Star, and Proteus, and broadcast on WLIU radio. Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, her first novel, has been published in 20 countries and translated into 18 languages. Helen has been awarded the 2010/11 Waverton Good Read Award, the Melissa Nathan Award for Comedy Romance, and an honorable mention for the 2011 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction.

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand carries within its deceptively charming pages a fully realized morality tale, a study of modern manners vs. well worn tradition, racial and cultural issues, religious tolerance, and the power of love to overcome all obstacles. Producers Paula Mazur, Mitchell Kaplan and Kevin McCormick have acquired screen rights to Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand. Jack Thorne has been hired to write the script for a film that will be a co-production between the Mazur Kaplan Company and McCormick’s Warner Bros.-based Langley Park Pictures.

In her latest novel, The Summer Before the War, Simonson returns with a breathtaking historical novel of love on the eve of World War I that reaches far beyond the small English town in which it is set.

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