Helen Brain is a full time writer, living in Cape Town, South Africa. her training is in music, she made a career change thirteen years ago when she moved to a rural fishing village.

She set aside three years to learn and practice the craft of writing for children before submitting her first book to a publisher. Since then she has published 30 books for children, and an adult memoir, 'Here be Lions'.she has been published locally by South African publishers Human and Rousseau, Nasou Via Afrika, Lux Verbi, Maskew Miller Longman, Shuter and Shooter and Oshun, and also by international publishers Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and Hodder and Murray.

Most of her books have been translated into Afrikaans, and some have also appeared in Portuguese, Xhosa, Zulu and Tswana