About Helen d’Amati
Helen d’Amati is the creator of The World Beyond the Veil — a woodland world of stories, gentle wisdom and a little magic.
Helen is a mum of two, Nanny Bear to a much-loved little granddaughter, and an integrative counselling and psychotherapy student based in Nottinghamshire.
Her stories grew from a love of character, imagination and the belief that children do not always need someone to fix what they are feeling. Sometimes they need someone willing to stay beside them while they find their own way through.
The World Beyond the Veil brings those ideas together in stories designed to be enjoyed first — with deeper conversations there if and when they are needed.
Where the Veil began.
The World Beyond the Veil began quietly — as a story created for someone I love.
What started as a personal gift slowly grew into something much bigger: a woodland world filled with maps, Whisperwings, curious creatures, gentle guardians and characters learning that being lost does not mean being broken.
As the world grew, so did its purpose.
The stories became a place to explore confidence, mistakes, boundaries, hope, connection and the quiet courage it takes to try again. They are shaped by imagination, by lived experience, and by the belief that sometimes the most powerful thing we can offer another person is not an answer, but our presence.
Before long, one story had become a world — and The World Beyond the Veil had found its own path.
Some worlds are planned. Others simply keep asking to be discovered.
The heart behind the stories.
For me, The World Beyond the Veil has always been about relationship.
Through family life, volunteering, pastoral support and my training as an integrative counsellor and psychotherapist, I have become increasingly interested in what happens when we stop trying to fix people and begin listening to them instead.
Children, especially, are often surrounded by adults who want to make things better quickly. Sometimes that is exactly what they need.
And sometimes they need something quieter.
Someone who will notice.
Someone who will stay.
Someone who will trust that their feelings make sense, even before they have the words to explain them.
That is the heart I try to carry into the Veil.
The characters do not always get things right. They wobble, misunderstand, retreat, get lost and try again — because that is what people do too.
The magic may belong to the woodland. The feelings belong to all of us.
Sometimes being beside someone is enough.
Beyond the woodland
When I’m not wandering around the Veil, I’m usually studying, writing, spending time with my family or wondering how one small idea somehow became an entire woodland.
I’m based in Nottinghamshire and am currently completing a master’s degree in integrative counselling and psychotherapy. Alongside that, I volunteer and continue learning about the many different ways we find connection, confidence and our own way forward.
I write as Helen d’Amati, and The World Beyond the Veil is published through Whisperwing Publications.
What began as one very personal story has grown into a world I hope children and grown-ups can return to again and again — sometimes simply for the adventure, and sometimes because one of its characters says something they needed to hear.
There is always another path waiting beyond the Veil.