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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.

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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...

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara and Ariana Harwicz are two leading figures in Argentinian and Latin American contemporary literature I came across their work after their books were translated into English by the Edinburgh-based Charco Press: as for most authors writing in a different language than English, for both writers the translations of their work into English have been crucial in reaching a wider audience, accessing literary prizes – each has had one nomination for the International Booker Prize – and securing new translation deals in even more languages      Born nine years apart – Cabezón Cámara in 1968 and Harwicz in 1977 – the pair met in 2014, and have since shared a continuous literary dialogue, of which this conversation forms a part Cabezón Cámara, the author of SLUM VIRGIN (2018), translated by Frances Riddle, and two novellas and two graphic novels in Spanish, is shortlisted for the 2020 International Booker Prize with THE ADVENTURES OF CHINA IRON (2019), translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre, a book that rescued a barely-mentioned female character from the Argentinian 1872 epic poem MARTIN FIERRO and turned it into a fantastic feminist queer epic adventure Harwicz was nominated for the same prize in 2018 with her debut novel DIE, MY LOVE (2017) translated by Carolina Orloff and Sarah Moses, which tells the story of a woman on the verge of madness living in rural France with her husband and unwanted baby Harwicz is also the author of FEEBLEMINDED (2019) translated by Carolina Orloff and Annie McDermott, which follows a woman in her late twenties living with her toxic and alcoholic mother These two are part of what Harwicz calls an ‘involuntary trilogy’: her first three books explore motherhood, how it affects the characters psychically, and how it sways their desires    Both Cabezón Cámara’s and Harwicz’s mastery lies in their distinctive prose Harwicz’s is characterised by short, intense sentences and characters that

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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Art

July 2013

Redressing the Balance: Women in the Art World

Louisa Elderton

Art

July 2013

London is among the capitals of the international art world. Every day and night is witness to innumerable new...

feature

May 2011

On the Relative Values of Humility and Arrogance; or the Confusing Complications of Negative Serendipity

Annabel Howard

feature

May 2011

On a distinctly drizzly Wednesday evening in February a friend of mine looked at me and said: ‘Only those who...

poetry

April 2017

The Village

Mona Arshi

poetry

April 2017

                                 When I pronounce...

 

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