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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...

In memory of Sandra Bland and Philando Castile   #1   Remember back in the heft of 2001? 7,227 items were delivered   to an old C&A in Oxford St – Landy sets up   a conveyor belt industrial shredders drills, saws clawhammers the violence of it and in them he puts his jeans his socks old shirts a stuffed toy bear family photos his car artworks his passport   he becomes       unidentitied              un-thinged   by white-gloved handlers   who place his belongings              gently into the shredder   or throw them into the trash compactor, joking              as if they’re on a production line   and they are, in fact, on a production line,              and then he is mediated by blades   and then, when he is              six tonnes of rubbish   it’s as if he has never              lived   all he can feel is his body his blue overalls   shock of cold air              on his neck   his eyes open his mother’s disappointment his father’s sheepskin jacket                           gone how could he he did afterwards,              his scalp is a buzz-cut tingle   his feet are holograms              he has never felt such who is the self where is he he is there and he is not there he is disappearing              the way men are always disappearing   in novels, and in pregnancies and here, in the gallery a man looks into his own life from outside dissolving – He makes a book              lists all the things                           300 pages a life he exhibits                           words

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

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

feature

February 2011

Old media, new year: China’s CCTV woos the nation’s netizens

Shepherd Laughlin

feature

February 2011

The CCTV New Year’s gala broadcast, known in Mandarin as Chunwan, is probably the most massive media event you’ve...

Art

June 2015

Photo London

Art

June 2015

From May 21-24, London’s Somerset House hosted the inaugural edition of London’s new international photography fair, Photo London.  ...

 

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