HELEN PATUCK
CREATIVE CONSULTANCY

ILLUSTRATION | STORYTELLING | CHILDREN'S BOOKS | TEACHING

"Writing, illustration, teaching, advocacy, creating safe spaces, connecting communities through art?

CC: me in."

Helen Patuck is a writer, illustrator and teacher of creative writing. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Bristol, and an MSc in Peacebuilding and international law from SOAS University of London. Helen founded the imprint, Kitabna - Our Book, in 2014, sharing creative writing with people affected by conflict and disaster. She developed Kitabna for several years between the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.

Since 2018, she has worked as a consultant to United Nations agencies and international NGOs on emergency mental health interventions, and has worked locally on refugee integration initiatives with the UK government and civil society. In 2025, Helen was awarded an Arts Council England "Developing your Creative Practice" DYCP grant, and teaches creative writing alongside swimming and English for speakers of other languages (ESOL) to women affected by displacement in the UK.

In April 2026, she will take up a residency as Creative Practitioner-in-Residence at the University of London's SAS Institute of Languages, Culture and Societies.

Helen is available for consultancies. Please review her portfolio here and former clients. For all rates and enquiries, please contact Helen at: helen.patuck@gmail.com.

PORTFOLIO

CHILDREN'S BOOKS

My work with the UN

Since the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, our “My Hero is You” team at WHO/IASC brings together UN agencies, MHPSS and technical experts, writers and artists (that's me) to create a children’s books series that shares coping mechanisms and caring conversations around mental health for children and their carers in emergencies. Ario the magical friend comes from children’s hearts, to help Sara and her friends feel better, and their first adventure was translated into over 160 languages, including braille.

It’s inspiring to work again with this team in 2024 to bring children’s voices into a new chapter for Ario and Sara, “My Hero is You: Supporting each other when wars come” - now available first in UN languages, English, Arabic and French, with multiple language adaptations in process, including Ukrainian and Hebrew.

My role on My Hero is You books is to write a script, inform it with children's feedback, and create illustrations to accompany the story. Over the years it has been challenging to write and paint around such sensitive subjects, but as always, human-centred design processes ensure we incorporate children and carer feedback from multiple countries affected by conflict into our creative process. We read answers to our questions about what children fear, hope and dream about from Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Mali, Syria, Lebanon, Ukraine, Palestine and Israel to understand what helps them feel less afraid. Then we shared the story with psychologists, protection experts, and again children, to understand if anything was frightening or unhelpful, funny or sad, at various stages of script-writing and illustration.

The books are freely available to read online and download, here:

My Hero is You, Storybook for Children on COVID-19:

https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/iasc-reference-group-mental-health-and-psychosocial-support-emergency-settings/my-hero-you-storybook-children-covid-19

My Hero is You 2021: How kids can hope with COVID-19:
https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/my-hero-is-you-2021

My Hero is You 2024, Supporting each other when wars come (field-test version): https://www.unicef.org/my-hero-is-you

My Hero is You 2025: Taking care of each other when mpox is here: https://www.mhinnovation.net/resources/my-hero-you-taking-care-each-other-when-mpox-here-field-test-version

Kitabna books for refugees

When I was studying Arabic in Beirut in 2014, I started writing and illustrating bilingual Arabic-English children's books for displaced Syrian families who did not have access to schools. With the help of my Syrian friends and colleagues, this became a project called Kitabna, which means "our book" in Arabic. In 2021, Kitabna - Our Book was registered as a non-profit organisation in the UK.

Kitabna – Our Book is a publishing initiative which builds on local storytelling practices and creative peacebuilding to develop safe spaces with communities affected by war. This has manifested in several ways: as multilingual illustrated children’s books, story-writing workshops, co-created stories and the development of psychosocial educational tools with INGOs, schools and civil society actors.

Based in London, Kitabna's legal form is a community interest company (CIC), which means we work as a non-profit with communities displaced by conflict in Syria, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine, Turkey, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Libya, Northern Ireland, Poland and Armenia. We have no political or religious affiliation and are self-funded through book sales and consultancies.

To date I have published eleven books with Kitabna, in collaboration with The Norwegian Refugee Council and the Northern Ireland Education Authority. I have illustrated several more co-created anthologies of children's stories with UNICEF and Save the Children International.

Our latest project with Save the Children in Poland shares 3 beautiful co-created books: Tales from Ukrainian children: https://www.kitabna.org/tales-from-ukrainian-children.html
You can check out our work and resources on the Kitabna website, linked below:

ILLUSTRATION

Language and Wellbeing Cards

In January 2025, I accepted an illustration commission for Jenna Arthur’s “Language and Wellbeing Cards”, which she will be piloting with children in her doctoral research with Ulster University this summer.

Each card represents a statement that has been gathered from children who are new to speaking English in Northern Ireland, alongside research insights into what affirmations can be supportive for speakers of English as a second or additional language.

From “I find it hard when I have to translate for my parents” to “I love it when my friends help me with my school work”, there are 23 statements to visualise, so 23 cards. The goal of Jenna’s cards is to help children express what they are feeling in a new school environment, even if they don’t know how to say it yet. This can then give adults a sense of how best to support them. At this early stage of piloting, Jenna is developing this prototype which she will share in a pilot phase, and then adapt, with children and teacher feedback.

After deciding with local children which native animals of Northern Ireland to include on her cards, Jenna explored size options in our last stage of design. We had to choose between Dixit or therapeutic card size, settling on 90mm x 120mm. This video shows the mocking-up process.

I was honoured when Jenna asked me to add my illustration signature to her cards. I believe they will be a great tool for teachers. Ulster University was described as a “force for good in fostering peace, prosperity and cohesion” when it was named the Times Higher Education university of the year in 2024. I greatly admire their Transitional Justice Institute, where I received my scholarship to do my PhD in Belfast, once upon a time. And now it's beautiful to support Jenna and her supervisor, both former ESOL teachers, bringing research into places it’s most needed.

Jenna reached out to me after discovering Kitabna’s Therapeutic Stories series, which is, alongside all of the books we created with the UK Vulnerable Person’s Resettlement Scheme, freely available to read on Kitabna’s website:

https://www.kitabna.org/therapeutic-stories.html

Illustrating our latest "My Hero is You" in early 2025

Early sketches and watercolours processes for our latest My Hero: Taking care of each other when mpox is here.

With our team of old and new colleagues at WHO and UNICEF, I collaborated as the script-writer and illustrator to support the mental health and well-being of children in places with mpox, as well as their parents and caregivers.

Living in a place with an infectious disease outbreak may cause fear, worry and loneliness. We asked children and their caregivers how they try to manage these feelings and support their well-being during an mpox outbreak. We also asked them to share their hopes and dreams for the future. Surveys in different languages were distributed in countries experiencing an mpox outbreak. A framework of topics to be addressed through the story was developed using the survey results. We then shared an early version of the story with children in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. They told us what they liked, what they did not like and then how to make the story better.

Over 150 children, parents, and caregivers shared their ideas and offered us feedback on the story. We listened to their feedback and wove their voices and ideas into the book, enriching the text and the illustrations. Our warmest gratitude to these children and their parents and caregivers for generously sharing their thoughts and being part of this story. Ario, Ario’s friends and our global team are grateful.

The story was developed for children aged 6-11 years old.

This book should be read by an adult to a child or a small group of children. It is not recommended that children read this book independently without the support of a parent, caregiver or adult.

You can access all language editions online for free below.

Psychosocial support

Some of my earliest professional illustration commissions came from NGOs requiring child-friendly depictions of psychosocial support.

This ranged from depicting children practicing breathing exercises, to visualising their safe places and caring conversations they might have with parents or loved ones.

My illustrations have been used in the Norwegian Refugee Council's Better Learning Programme manuals for MHPSS in classrooms in emergency settings (MENA and global editions) and WHO publications.

Co-creating children's stories

A large amount of my illustration work is in service to the stories children have written with me or their carers in story-writing workshops. I consider it a huge honour to work with their material, and try to use a human-centred approach in my illustration of their stories. This involves incorporating their conceptualisation of their imagined universe into my artwork, and reaching out to them for feedback wherever possible.

You can check out some of these co-created stories on the Kitabna website:

Supporting public services

Since 2019 I have been supporting the Northern Ireland Education Authority with resources that welcome refugee families resettled in the UK under the UK Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme. These children's books shared scenes of community cohesion and connection.

The illustration here was commissioned by the University of Tromsø in Norway this spring 2024, for their research project with the Norwegian Police to improve immigration policing.

These illustrations will be used to explain to children in a non-verbal way how police might enter their home to discuss their families immigration situation. Here I am demonstrating with soft body language how these interactions should go, potentially alleviating any stress children might associate with visitations from authority figures.

TEACHING ~ MENTORSHIP

ESOL Conversation Clubs for Women

In January 2025, I started teaching ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) to refugee and newcomer women in England for the Community Council for Somerset.

After volunteering at my local "Conversation Club" since 2023, I saw the great in this space, for social connection and language acquisition for isolated women in our communities. In late 2024, I accepted a position from the charity to set up three new classes.
My students come from - Chard has had a total of 8 students from Ukraine, Latvia, Mexico, Portugal, Afghanistan, Mexico and Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Morocco, Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Turkiyë, Thailand and Jordan.

We cover subjects related to wellbeing, vocational goals, access to education, navigating public services and building a life in a new country.

For this position, I hold a TEFL qualification in Teaching English as a Foreign Language.

Arts Council England Creative Writing Workshops 2025-26

In March 2025, I received a "Developing Your Creative Practice" grant from Arts Council England as a teacher of creative writing.

This grant allows me to facilitate 10 creative writing workshops across the UK and Europe, over one year, for organisations I believe are creating safe spaces for people experiencing xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny and violence. The workshop outputs can be fairly open-ended and guided by my participants (best practices, a book, exhibition materials, for example).

With this grant I can fund my own time and travel, and can even offer organisations a small sum towards workshop facilitation costs.

These workshops will be:

- co-designed and tailored to an organisation's goals for community, cultural preservation or artistic freedom
- an introduction to helpful creative writing exercises
- a comprehensive introduction to Kitabna's story-writing toolkit which is freely available in English, Armenian, Arabic, French, Polish, Ukrainian, Romanian and Pashto
- an opportunity to exchange knowledge around best creative practices.

Mentorship

In January 2025, I started mentoring British novelist Han Smith in teaching creative writing with non-native English speaking groups.

Like myself, Han is both a writer and an ESOL teacher, and when she discovered Kitabna's approaches to story-writing to communities displaced by conflict and disaster she asked for my mentorship as she implements creative writing sessions with her students in south-east England.

My mentorship to Han is part of her 2024-25 Arts Council England funded "Developing Your Creative Practice" grant.

Han's beautiful debut novel, "Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking" was published by John Murray Originals press in 2024.

STORYTELLING

Toolkit for story-writing

When Kitabna began in 2014, as a small community project in Lebanon, our dream was to make books and stories available to children who had lost their homes and schools. Kitabna means “our book” in Arabic, and the dream of our organisation has always been to see the proliferation of books and stories made freely available to children affected by conflict and disaster, in their languages — and, increasingly, in their words, too.

By setting the first stories in refugee camps, we hoped to create stories in which children could see their own lives, as places where magical things could happen. By making the books multi-lingual, we made the stories available in the languages of the refugee and host community, hoping to create in the pages of a book a shared space of empathy and understanding.

When some guidance was requested for reading books with children, we started to develop a storytelling and story-writing methodology. This set of practices has evolved over a decade of workshops delivered to teachers, education practitioners and psychologists working with children in Lebanon, Iraqi Kurdistan, Jordan, Turkey, Israel-Palestine, Syria, Libya, Northern Ireland, Armenia and Poland. It was with great happiness that we could team up in a research collaboration with Cardiff University and the Armenian NGOs Educational and Cultural Bridges and Cultural and Social Narratives Laboratory to fully develop this toolkit over 2023 and 2024, with funding from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. Our special thanks to David Clarke, Arpine Kostanyan, Mariam Yeghiazaryan and Liana Ohanyan for making this possible.

In this toolkit, we build on the early concepts developed by Helen Patuck and Maria Chambers, of Firefly International, of creative writing practice and group art therapy. We were able to hone and develop these tools into guidance for story-writing with communities affected by conflict and disaster over several years of delivering and developing workshops with international NGOs working in the fields of emergency education and mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS). Former and current members of the Kitabna team, Asia Haidar, Lin Bilal, Dr. Usama Alshughry, Shannon Rayner and Federica Margini have all contributed to these practices, in their fields of MHPSS, child safeguarding, journalism, translation and immigration support. We are forever grateful for the financial and logistical support of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Tahaddi Centre Lebanon, the AMAR Foundation, the Northern Ireland Education Authority, UNICEF, the International Organisation for Migration and Save the Children International. Their patronage, collaborative working practices and openness to creative methods have made our work possible over the past ten years.

In many ways, these practices have been informed by every participant we have ever worked with, so we hope to honour their contributions in this toolkit by making our work — “our book” — available as a freely available resource, for anyone to use in their work with children affected by conflict and disaster. We especially focus on the contributions of our Armenian participants, who attended a Kitabna story-writing workshop in Yerevan in April 2023, and have been involved in the piloting and testing of this toolkit with children affected by the Artsakh conflict, which escalated during the process of our project, with the Azerbaijani invasion of September 2023.

You can access our freely available toolkit in Armenian and English here.

Women's inheritance rights

Some of my favourite storytelling projects have involved people reaching out to tell me about the wonderful work they're doing, and asking how storytelling could help engage their beneficiaries and donors in their projects. This was certainly the case with the Information, Counselling and Legal Assistance teams at the Syrian office of The Norwegian Refugee Council.

Between 2019-20, this team of lawyers needed to shared the contents of a report on the struggles Syrian women faced when trying to access their housing land and property rights.

Our project involved the illustration and layout of five different women's oral histories of courage and struggle as they fought against tradition and patriarchal norms to access security for themselves and their loves ones. This involved the re-creation of old photographs, and depiction of scenes involving family disputes. I created family trees based on the native fruit trees of the region each woman came from - this time including women's names, on family trees that had otherwise only included male family members.

It was a big pleasure to support NRC ICLA as the artist on this project, and also to hear how the booklet is used for advocacy and training purposes in Syria and the wider region.

You can read more about this project here:

Step-by-Step app for MHPSS

This is a snapshot of the script development for the WHO Step-by-Step app developed to help people coping with depression.

I worked as the writer in a team of psychologists, healthcare professionals and app developers to rewrite the existing Step-by-Step e-mental health intervention into something more engaging for users.

For this app, I created four different storylines: two male and two female, each exploring the challenges faced when recovering from depression, low mood and anxiety.

For this project I led the creative development of character, voice and plot in line with the practical activities/techniques of the psychological intervention. I also worked on harmonising the text and illustrations within the application.

A review of the project is available here:

Effects of a WHO-guided digital health intervention for depression in Syrian refugees in Lebanon: A randomized controlled trial

Chatbot for MHPSS

WHO STARS chatbot for adolescents experiencing emotional distress.

In this project I was working with psychologists to rewrite the existing STARS e-mental health intervention.
Using human-centred design with local participation groups to develop warm, engaging chatbot script. Creative development of characters and plots to engage users in practical, low-risk basic cognitive behavioural therapy tools for emotional distress when access to formal healthcare is limited. Piloting in South Africa, former pilots in the Caribbean and Palestine.

Sustainable Technology for Adolescents and youth to Reduce Stress (STARS): a WHO transdiagnostic chatbot for distressed youth: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/wps.20947

Teaching creative writing

Since 2015, I have been teaching creative writing to adults and children using a simple creative methodology.

In the past ten years I have been delivering these story-writing workshops for organisations supporting refugee, newcomer and asylum-seeking families, often leading to the co-creation of books showcasing their stories. This process can be run with adults and children, with a focus on self-reliance and capacity-building for organisations hoping to use creative methods with people they support.

If you would like to learn more about the workshops I deliver, as an individual or organisation, please just get in touch.

Inter-cultural stories

I taught story-writing completely online for the first time with IOM Turkey's Psychosocial Support (PSS) Mobile teams based in six regional offices of İzmir, Gaziantep, Kahramanmaraş, Şanlıurfa Hatay, and İstanbul in 2021.

My two-day story-writing workshop with each regional office shared storytelling techniques, story-writing tools and engagement with the specific social challenges PSS officers face in their own unique contexts. Participants reflected on the conversations and MHPSS tools they wished to package in a compelling storyline. This was followed by the process of working these tools into an engaging and creative narrative. Once this was done, teams were divided into the following five roles:

- Writer/editor
- Translator > Turkish-Arabic
- Illustrator
- Designer of story and team identity
- Activities developer

The final stories of each of the five groups were presented in a final one-day national workshop, where each team presented what they have discovered about themselves and their teams. Each group shared how they would like to use these skills going forward, and how stories can become a way to reach those made vulnerable by war, disaster and oppressive institutions in their communities.

Participants needed access to:

- their computers, and a good internet connection, but this activity can be carried out from home for all participants.
- pen and paper for making notes.
- access to their phones/WhastApp to share media

Online tools used:

To meet the needs of participants with low bandwidth connection, we used simple online tools:

- Zoom: for collective online group space, and separate “Zoom Break Out Rooms” for smaller group work
- Google Jam Board: for interactive “whiteboard” space
- WhatsApp Group: to share audio files, pictures and pre-recorded activities

This project led to a commission for me to illustrate these five stories into Arabic, Turkish and English children's books.