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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...

‘I’m not so motivated by fashion and brands,’ explains Tim Walker – one of the world’s leading fashion photographers Given that Walker’s work is most frequently found between the glossy covers of high-end fashion magazines – LOVE, i-D and of course the myriad international imprints of Vogue, to name but a few –  this statement makes for an interesting juxtaposition The incongruence is only exacerbated in context of our meeting at Somerset House to mark the opening of his Mulberry-sponsored exhibition (and recently published book) Story Teller Collating the dramatic dreamscapes of Walker’s photographs, not just in the large format pictorial form to which photography is so often consigned in gallery spaces but rather in an immersive and tactile pseudo-reality enabled in part by the inclusion of the props and design that set them apart, Story Teller is Walker in microcosm: a bridge between two worlds   The transcendence of Walker’s work – which cannot be confined to, or labeled solely as a product of the fashion industry – is marked by its appreciation in the wider field of photographic arts While it is true that the 42 year old Briton’s work has been featured more than that of any other photographer, almost month by month, in the pages of Vogue, there are also images from his portfolio hanging as permanent fixtures at the Victoria & Albert Museum and National Portrait Gallery in London In 2008 he staged his first major solo exhibition, in conjunction with the publication of his first book Pictures, at The Design Museum and in 2009 received an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York Indeed, Walker’s work is more than the sum of its parts Like the artist Mark Rothko, whose expansive canvases leave room for the viewer’s thoughts to fill, the photographer’s dreamlike fantasies are a world created not just for himself but for his audience   And, in that sense, Story Teller is a fitting collection: inclusive and representative of Walker’s extensive body of work and his own personality rather than reflective of the closed-off nature and widespread exclusivity of the fashion

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


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Interview

March 2017

Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

Enea Zaramella

Rodrigo Hasbún

TR. Sophie Hughes

Interview

March 2017

Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected...

Art

May 2013

Techno-primitivism

Vanessa Hodgkinson

David Trotter

Art

May 2013

What follows could have been an essay or an interview. In the event, it resembles the one as little...

Interview

September 2013

Interview with László Krasznahorkai

George Szirtes

Interview

September 2013

László Krasznahorkai was born in Gyula, Hungary, in 1954, and has written five novels and several collections of essays...

 

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