Helen Lackner is an independent speaker and researcher with a focus on Yemen.

Helen studied social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and social planning in developing countries at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the editor of the annual Journal of the British-Yemeni Society and a regular contributor to Open Democracy, Arab Digest, Oxford Analytica and other publications. She has spoken on the Yemeni crisis in many public forums, including in the UK House of Commons.

Helen also worked as a freelance rural development consultant, with a particular interest in water among other environmental issues, for three decades. In recent years, she has refocused on in-depth analytic work and writing. She now mainly writes about the crisis in Yemen, a country with which she has been involved since the early 1970s and where she lived for more than 15 years between the 1970s and the 2010s. In July 2022, Routledge published her latest book, Yemen: Poverty and Conflict.