Country: UK

Helen Owens (nee Belyakova) is a contemporary writer and a practicing lawyer. Born in Vladivostok in 1976 into a family of industrial fisherpersons. In 1979, the family moved to Sosnovy Bor, a town in the Leningrad Region, where the writer spent her entire childhood. In 1993, she entered the law faculty of the St. Petersburg Humanitarian University of Trade Unions and after graduation she worked in her specialty in St. Petersburg. In 2016, Helen immigrated to the UK. Strong nostalgia for the Motherland inspired the author to write her debut work — the short story «The Volga River Flows» (the original title was «The Woodcutters», was first published in 2018 under the pseudonym «Elena Graneva») and several poems. After this, she wrote her first novel «The Bitter Taste of Salt», a work of realistic prose about people and for people, about friendship, honour and betrayal, about love and hatred and the eternal theme of fathers and children. Among its many qualities the novel adds a strong voice against domestic violence to contemporary Russian literature.