The Hand that Signed The Paper's Helen Demidenko to publish new novel

London: Helen Dale, the author who faked a Ukrainian heritage for her first novel, The Hand that Signed The Paper, is about to re-enter the world she spectacularly upended, by reissuing her controversial book and publishing a second.

Dale's The Hand that Signed The Paper, published in 1994, tells the story of a Ukrainian family who sided with the Nazis against Bolshevik Jews in World War II. It was published under her then pen name Helen Demidenko and won the Vogel and Miles Franklin literary awards before she was exposed as a literary hoaxer.

Helen Dale, formerly Helen Darville and Helen Demidenko, is preparing to release a new book.Credit: Latika Bourke

Now she plans a reissue of that novel, and the publication of her second, a courtroom drama titled Kingdom of the Wicked. Published on Saturday by Australian independent publisher Ligature, The Hand That Signed The Paper reissue will include a new introduction to the novel, in which Dale defends her work: "I had a serious point to make: being imaginative is more important for a writer than being from the 'right' ethnic background or having the 'right' experience."

Ligature is a "co-operative electronic platform" set up by Matt Rubinstein who was shortlisted for the Vogel award in 1993, the same year that Dale won under the name Demidenko.

Dale in 1995 after winning the Miles Franklin award under the name Helen Demidenko.Credit: Robert Pearce

Speaking exclusively to Fairfax Media, Dale is unrepentant about the scandal surrounding her first novel, saying: "I thought that it was a reasonable approach to getting myself published ... I probably would have disappeared and been a boring middle-class solicitor somewhere [if not]."

But there have been costs. "It is a battle scar," she conceded.

Dale, born Helen Darville, changed her name after the scandal cost her employment opportunities and, in the 20 years since, her employers, including the Liberal Democrat senator for NSW David Leyonhjelm, have faced constant calls for her sacking.

She said the most ferocious response to the book continues to come from the Jewish community. "By miles, that just dwarfed everything else," she said.

The Hand That Signed the Paper was widely criticised for its sympathetic portrayal of perpetrators of the Holocaust.

"When people were writing to David [Leyonhjelm], that was the main [complaint] – 'you hired a racist, you hired an anti-Semite'.

"Every time one or the other of us was in the news, he would get a flood of emails, often extremely abusive and unpleasant, trying to get him to sack me because I was a bad person – people had decided I was a bad person because of the novel.

"It's followed me overseas," said Dale, who has studied law at Oxford and cross-qualified at night school at the University of Edinburgh to practise in Scotland.

"I had a wingnut object to my admission as a solicitor in Scotland; I got a letter saying 'the objection was on the basis that you wrote a racist book' – that was in 2012," she said.

Dale said these demands – that her body of work as an author disqualified her from unrelated, future employment – had transformed her from being apolitical to a "free speech fundamentalist".

"I certainly developed that view that free speech is a paramount right."

Her political leanings drew her into a right-wing blogging community in the mid-2000s where she met her future boss and friend Leyonhjelm. As senator, he co-signed a bill to weaken section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, after the Coalition government, led by Tony Abbott, went soft on the issue. The right-wing push to amend the act recently failed in Parliament, although some changes were made to the way complaints are handled to prevent vexatious litigation.

Dale said she would have been a prime target if Paul Keating's addition to the act in 1995, making it illegal to "offend" or "insult" a person on the basis of their race or ethnicity, had been in effect at the time of the publication of The Hand That Signed The Paper, even though artistic work, fair comment and fair and accurate reporting are exempt under section 18D.

"I did think if I were the lawyer for the complainant you would argue this was done in bad faith because this person is clearly a smart arse."

Her second novel will appear under her real name and there will be no pretences about its origins. Kingdom of the Wicked came about while she was studying at Oxford funded by a scholarship won through the US-based Institute of Humane Studies. When Dale realised she had six months left and there would be no 100,000-word doctoral thesis in the pipeline, but rather a follow-up to her vexed literary debut, she returned the remaining funds.

"I made sure I wrote to them personally and apologised for what I'd done. They weren't hugely happy but I did at least give some money back," she said.

Kingdom of the Wicked, due to be published in October, is a courtroom drama, which asks what the Romans – after the industrial revolution, but without the intellectual enlightenment, would conceive of Jesus. "The nasty answer that kept coming back to me ... was I don't think they'd see him as a hippie, they'd see him as a terrorist."

Dale returned to her legal career in the UK after quitting Leyonhjelm's office over his decision to hire two American advisors who she believed did not understand Australians. But Leyonhjelm will launch her book when she returns in October.

In 2006 Dale told the ABC she hoped she would "never, ever have to deal with anybody as nutty and as weird as the Australian literary establishment ever again". Eleven years later, Dale knows the unpleasant confrontations are coming when she turns up promoting her second offering to that very community.

"If I want people to read my book I have to show my face ... I just have to wear it."

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