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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...

BROOD   after Goya’s Pinturas Negras   Saturn never expected to devour his children,   his fingertips digging into their ribs, light   -headed Didn’t start out weeping, or sense   as he hid in his winter bath on that murky morning   up to his eyes gazing over   the loosely level surface that healed   its holes as his knees withdrew And he didn’t   remember it later that night, even after   he found dried blood in his nails The steady rush   was all he recalled, a creek after rain, a head slumping   forward, a riddle resolved One son he had raised   to the light like a t-shirt he’d worn   every day for weeks on end for a band   he could no longer stand             GROUNDED   if                                                                                                                                   then they                                                                                                                            climb nod off                                                                                                                your roof as static                                                                                                          hail a cloud drowns the anchor’s voice     

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

June 2016

Interview with Cao Fei

Izabella Scott

Interview

June 2016

The Chinese artist Cao Fei documents life in her country’s rapidly changing urban and social landscapes. Her eclectic work...

poetry

March 2015

Coup & Bell Curve

Elizabeth Willis

poetry

March 2015

COUP   Mallarmé’s gambling astonished everyone even the poets   An acre of paper sold down a river whose...

Interview

May 2011

Interview with Alison Klayman

Shepherd Laughlin

Interview

May 2011

Until his arrest in Beijing on 3 April as he boarded a plane to Hong Kong, Ai Weiwei was...

 

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