About me
My first name is Helle [ˈhɛlə], which few people outside Denmark know how to pronounce. (I don’t mind being called Helen, but dislike if I’m called Hell.) That’s the reason I use my initials H. S. in my author name. The S. stands for Sidelmann, which is a middle name.
I’m Danish and I grew up on a golf course in Denmark. Literally! The driving range was on the other side of our garden hedge. I started playing golf with my dad when I was two years old, I learnt to ski (cross country) on the golf course, and it was our playground when the golfers had gone home in the evening. I was also a scout, so I spent a lot of time outdoors.
Whenever I wasn’t running around outside, I had a book in my hands. I read while eating, brushing my teeth, walking home from school, under the covers at night with a flashlight, and sitting on swings. I credit my mum. She was an English teacher and a full-time reader. From an early age, she fed me fairy tales and passed her love of books on to me.
I used to daydream about fairies or good witches or magic carpets appearing out of nowhere. (The magic carpets usually popped up when I was walking home from school and it was raining.) I imagined opening doors into other worlds and disappearing into them. Nothing ever happened. Not really. But I discovered that I could stay inside the books, continue the stories, and imagine futures for the characters I liked or even invent my own stories. I kept daydreaming and imagining things, as I grew up, but I never wrote anything down and I never thought becoming an author was a possibility.
At university, I got a Master’s degree in Economics and Business Administration. Afterwards I had a career, working in corporate marketing strategy and communications. My jobs were interesting and gave me opportunities to travel and work abroad (and later, so did my husband’s jobs).
I have lived in the UK (Milton Keynes and London), the US (New Jersey and Georgia), Austria, Singapore and Switzerland, where I live now with my husband and two teenage sons.
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I began trying to write stories when my children were quite young, but for years I never got beyond chapter three. Then in 2010 I finally made it to the end of a first draft of a middle grade novel. The next four years was spent rewriting and editing that novel, while I learnt the craft of writing through books, workshops, and writing groups. In 2016, I put my writing-apprenticeship novel aside and wrote a story about a ski-racing girl and a barbegazi. That story, THE MISSING BARBEGAZI, was published by Pushkin Press in 2018 and Jolly Fish Press in the US in 2019.
When I’m not writing or reading, I spend my time outdoors either skiing, hiking, walking, golfing or taking photos.
Hiking in St. Anton, Austria 
Skiing in Schöngraben, Austria
Read more about me and my journey to becoming an author in these Interviews.
A short author bio and high resolution author photos can be found here.