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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...

‘INQUESTS INTO THE DEATHS ARISING FROM THE FISHMONGERS’ HALL AND LONDON BRIDGE TERROR ATTACK CASE MANAGEMENT’1   with asides, insertions, questions and other patterns repeating   Begin with the facts: A convicted terrorist attacked and killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers’ Hall on 29 November, 2019 The attacker [ ] was shot dead by police officers on London Bridge   No: again   A terrorist incarcerated in a high-security prison appeals his indeterminate sentence        He will now be released automatically, in a fixed number of years, without parole board assessment   December 2018 He is released He is living halfway and then alone under myriad restrictions He had counter-terrorism mentors        the government contract abruptly ended        Months pass No train stations, no trains        no internet access, no trips to London, no        level of security        stops what happens next The oversight of Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (Mappa) probation, police, counter-terrorism, Prevent, Special Branch, MI5        who read creative writing, who read Cambridge University programme        (there was none, post release) and with bare discussion, and        the risk downgraded from very high        to high        and no one exactly gives permission        no one exactly assesses the risks he takes the train to London for one day 29 November, 2019   Arrives at London Bridge to celebrate five years of Learning Together, a prison education programme2 Taking university students into prisons to learn alongside incarcerated people In minimum, medium and maximum facilities (call it high- security, Category A), learning Plato in Philosophy, the laws of probability, and creative writing   The Justice asked the prison governor: did you consider the risks of putting people who were potentially violent, manipulative and predatory directly alongside potentially young students in a learning environment        yes        and the course began   No physical harm came to them there The deep violence of the prison apparently held outside        the writing room The meeting of writing together        considered low risk        the violence of the prison where he was known as emir The concentration on him and his        masks        the violence of the prison,  the breaking        the drug        abuse, the harm        the many serving long and life there        the violence of the prison only seen in reflection        the emphasis on counter-narrative        on hope   He took part

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

poetry

February 2014

Two Poems from A Finger in the Fishes Mouth

Derek Jarman

poetry

February 2014

To mark the 20th anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, Test Centre has produced a facsimile edition of his sole,...

Art

June 2012

'The Freedom of Speech Itself', or the betrayal of the voice

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Art

June 2012

‘The instability of an accent, its borrowed and hybridised phonetic form, is testimony not to someone’s origins but only...

poetry

November 2011

Cooper's Hawk

Elyse Fenton

poetry

November 2011

My breath’s the wind’s breathless down-stroke hasty claw like the gnarred finger of juniper just now clambering for a...

 

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