Helen Winick
(???? – ????)
Helen Winick (sometimes spelled ‘Winnick’) was a London fan active in the 1950s.
She is mentioned in The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society in 1950 and as an attendee at Coroncon in 1953. A letter in Femizine in 1954 said she’d been reading sf for 17 years. In 1955, she is noted as working in or perhaps running a bookshop and in 1956 she was involved in an ultimately unsuccessful scheme to use the upstairs room of a club she co-owned in London’s Berwick Street as a kind of sf club.
Brian Aldiss has credited Winick with introducing him to fandom. He told the story several times – in Hell’s Cartographers, Bury My Heart at W H Smith’s, and The Twinkling of an Eye – albeit not always entirely consistently. In essence, he claims Winick wrote to him and invited him to attend the meetings at The Globe, prompted either by his story winning a competition in the Observer newspaper or by the publication of Non-Stop. This positions the anecdote somewhere between 1954 and 1958.
There was some speculation that Winick was the author of the pseudonymous Francezka columns in Femizine from #3 to #8. Sandy Sanderson, who edited Femizine in his guise as Joan Carr, made the claim in Aporrheta 11 (May 1959). Perhaps because of this, she was suspected by some (incorrectly) of being the author of the Penelope Fandergaste columns in Aporrheta.
According to Etherline 67 (1956), she was to be the editor of an anthology called Woman’s World forthcoming from publisher Max Reinhardt. There is however no evidence that the book ever appeared.
She is referred to as both Helen Winick and Helen Winnick in contemporary fanzines, but references to the former are in the majority and published letters use the single-N version, so that is most likely correct.
She is not mentioned in fan publications after 1959.
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