Humphreys was born in Kingston-on-Thames, England, along with her brother Martin and sister Cathy. She now lives in Kingston, Ontario with her dog Charlotte. When she was younger she was expelled from high school and had to attend an alternative school to finish her education.
Writing career
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 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 had this to say about Ms. Humphreys's recent 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 : "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."
