Helen Darville

Helen Dale (born 24 January 1972), also known as Helen Darville and Helen Demidenko, is an Australian writer and lawyer.

While studying English literature at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, she wrote The Hand that Signed the Paper, a novel about a Ukrainian family who become both bystanders and perpetrators during the Holocaust. In 1993, the novel won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript. It was first published in 1994 under the pseudonym Helen Demidenko and won the Miles Franklin Award the following year before becoming the subject of a major Australian literary controversy about the author's false claims of Ukrainian ethnicity. The misrepresentation has been described as a "literary hoax" in the Sydney Morning Herald and the novel was subsequently reissued under her then real name, Helen Darville.