Helen Humphreys (born March 29, 1961) is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Humphreys was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England. Her brother Martin and sister Cathy were born after the family moved to Canada. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario, with her dog, Fig. When she was younger, Humphreys was expelled from high school and had to attend an alternative school to finish her education.
Humphreys's first novel, Leaving Earth, was a New York Times Notable Book in 1998, and a winner of the City of Toronto Book Award.
In describing how she became a writer, Humphreys said: "I started writing when I was young and I just kept going. I read voraciously. I sent my poems (for I was writing exclusively poems then) out to magazines, and eventually I began to get them published. My first book of poetry came out when I was 25."
In a very favourable review of The Reinvention of Love in The Globe and Mail, Donna Bailey Nurse wrote: "The story is set amid the political turbulence and artistic fervour of 19th-century Paris. Charles Sainte-Beuve, an influential critic, earns the friendship of Victor Hugo after writing a review celebrating the writer's poems. He joins Hugo's literary circle, the Cenacle, which includes painter Delacroix, poet Lamartine and the boastful, profligate Alexandre Dumas. Charles becomes a fixture in the bustling Hugo household on Notre-Dame-des-Champs."
The Globe and Mail wrote about Humphreys's 2015 novel: "The Evening Chorus, when all is said and done, is a formally conventional but for the most part satisfying yarn; a quiet novel about a calamitous event whose most trenchant passages show the cast of Humphreys's poet's eye."
Quill & Quire says of The River (2017): "Comparing The River to Helen Humphreys's critically acclaimed bestseller The Frozen Thames, her 2007 collection of vignettes about the eponymous river, it's obvious that the author is not content to repeat past successes. The new book, a wide-ranging exploration of the Napanee River in Ontario, along which she owns a small property, clearly shows that Humphreys possesses extraordinary tools and wields them with daring and precision."
In 2023, she was the recipient of the Writers' Trust of Canada's Matt Cohen Award for her career in writing.
The Perils of Geography (1995)
Leaving Earth (1998) – winner of the City of Toronto Book Award
Afterimage (2000) – winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Wild Dogs (2004) – adapted for the stage by Anne Hardcastle in 2008
The Reinvention of Love (2011)
Nocturne: On the Life and Death of My Brother (2013)
The River (2015), ISBN 1770412557
The Ghost Orchard: The Hidden History of the Apple in North America (2017), ISBN 1443451517
Field Study: Meditations on a Year at the Herbarium (2021), ISBN 1770415343
And a Dog Called Fig: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life (2022), ISBN 037460388X