Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt is an American novelist. She is the author of the novels The Last Samurai and Lightning Rods (2011) and the short story collection Some Trick (2018). In 2025, a novel which she co-wrote with Ilya Gridneff and published on her website in 2008, Your Name Here, was republished as a commercial book.

Early life and education

Helen DeWitt was born in Takoma Park, Maryland. She grew up primarily in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador in Latin America, as her parents worked in the United States diplomatic service.

After a year at Northfield Mount Hermon School and two short periods at Smith College, DeWitt studied classics at the University of Oxford, first at Lady Margaret Hall, and then at Brasenose College for her D.Phil., where her thesis examined the concept of propriety in ancient literary criticism.

Afterwards she became a junior research fellow at Somerville College, Oxford. She spent about ten years in Oxford. It was published in 2000 by Talk Miramax Books.

In 1999, DeWitt had completed another novel, Lightning Rods, and later signed a contract for it with Miramax Books in 2003, but it remained unpublished and in limbo. After Miramax Books was folded into Hyperion Books in late 2007, she asked for the rights to be returned. It was eventually published in 2011 by New Directions.

In 2005 she collaborated with Ingrid Kerma, the London-based painter, writing "limit5" for the exhibition "Blushing Brides".

In 2008 she published Your Name Here, which was written in collaboration with the Australian-Canadian journalist Ilya Gridneff, as a PDF on her website.

In 2012 an excerpt from an in-progress novel set in Flin Flon, Manitoba, was published online by Open Book: Ontario at the end of an article about the novel and DeWitt's difficulties in finding a publisher.

Her short story "Climbers", which explores artistic ideals and commercial realities of the writing life, was published in Harper's Magazine November 2014.

In 2018, a collection of 13 of her short stories, Some Trick, was published by New Directions. It was shortlisted for the 2019 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize.

DeWitt published a novella, The English Understand Wool, in 2022. The novella was published as part of a new series from New Directions Publishing, "Storybook ND", which aims to deliver "the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon".

In 2025, her 2008 co-written novel (with Ilya Gridneff), Your Name Here, originally published on her website, was published as a commercial book by Deep Vellum and Dalkey Archive Press. It was described as a "sweeping and experimental anti-war novel". DeWitt extensively described it in her blog. After her decline of the prize, the economist Tyler Cowen gave her a grant of the same sum. Cowen described the newly established grant as:

Personal life As reported in 2016, "DeWitt knows, in descending order of proficiency, Latin, ancient Greek, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese".

While in Oxford, DeWitt married classicist David Levene; they divorced after seven years. DeWitt said that "Meeting David is what made me a writer", and that he "introduced me to bridge, to poker, to statistics, things that to other people might seem completely unrelated".

DeWitt had two suicide attempts.

Works Novels and novellas

Short story collection