Helen Cusack O'Keeffe, France

​Helen Cusack O'Keeffe's academic background is in Russian language and literature, psychology, and briefly, archaeology. Based in Paris since 2008, she is a writer and freelancer with a diverse portfolio that includes mental health assessment reports for child refugees, translations, art direction and styling for music videos, theatre and films. She is the co-founder and host of the Damremont Writers Group, (a weekly novelists forum, since 2009), former art director of the Poetry Brothel Paris, and has been part of the Paris Lit Up editorial team since the magazine's inception in 2012. Her fiction has been published in various literary journals and anthologies, and three of her plays have been produced in Paris and abroad. Under the pseudonym PomPom de la Tour Awfful she also designs and creates surrealist couture and is obsessed by all things Années Folles, in particular the new geometry and freedoms heralded by the Dadaists.