Mailing List


Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

GWF Hegel isn’t looking too good With an afternoon of student tutorials to attend at the School of Sculpture Without Objects, the brittle corpus of this 240-year-old philosopher looks set to crumble at any moment Katrina Palmer suggests we’d better keep a dustpan and brush to hand There might be some residue to sweep up   Since her first novel, The Dark Object, was published by Book Works as part of Stewart Home’s ‘Semina’ series in 2010, Palmer has crafted a recalcitrant form of artist’s fiction that tempers its philosophically informed investigations of sculptural materiality with a wry humour It’s a mode of writing that transitions fluidly between print, audio and spoken performance, constantly testing the perimeters of its contextual environs along the way As Palmer puts it in that book, even the bodies of revered philosophers may become subject to the peculiar strategies of ontological investigation that her writing proposes Indeed, both the bumbling (but lovable?) Slovenian nose-twitcher Slavoj Žižek and the aforementioned dusty dialectician are lyrically plied and moulded into a body of raw thought-matter, in a novel that satirises the numerous micro-fascisms of aesthetic pedagogy   This summer, End Matter – an ambitious Artangel project set on the Isle of Portland just south of Dorset’s Jurassic Coast – saw Palmer’s writing extend through a radio play broadcast by the BBC and a series of audio-guided walks that sought to lead visitors through the vertiginous territories of the quarried moonscape, long famed for its brilliant white stone A colossal cavity mined to substantiate the pillars of empire, the island has provided a notorious source for the iconic building blocks used most notably while plugging the entrance to hell with the Bank of England Visiting the work earlier in the year, I was surprised at the sense of vulnerability it managed to induce as I chartered its narrativised pathways through tumbledown crags and along the peripheries of voidal recesses While British land art has always been defined by its quaint localities (in contrast to the heroic immensities of US frontierism), it was startling to experience the deftness with which Palmer was able to destabilise and make

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

fiction

November 2013

Special School

Iphgenia Baal

fiction

November 2013

Art

September 2011

Interview with Cornelia Parker

Lowenna Waters

Art

September 2011

Cornelia Parker has over the past twenty years carved out a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected sculptors...

Interview

September 2012

Interview with Michael Hansmeyer

Lawrence Lek

Interview

September 2012

Every project made with a computer expresses a relationship between aesthetics and technology. The historical progress of technology works...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required