Helen Chamberlin

Helen Chamberlin was a secondary teacher of English and languages before she entered the publishing industry in 1971 as a trainee editor at Heinemann Educational Australia. She has  worked in the industry every since, at first in educational publishing at Thomas Nelson, Macmillan Education, Longman Cheshire and Heinemann, and freelance, working mainly on primary level reading series and secondary English, languages and humanities texts. In 1990 she joined the independent, family-owned Australian publishing company, Lothian Books, where she edited a variety of adult non-fiction titles including gardening, crafts, biographies and self-help books. In 1993 she became the children’s book publisher at Lothian and built the children’s list there to 60-70 titles a year until Lothian Books was sold to Hachette in 2006. Helen then became the children’s book publisher for Hachette Australia and continued to produce a prize-winning picture book list there until her retirement in December 2008. She now works as a publishing consultant and freelance editor on children’s books and adult fiction.