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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...

for the spirit of Jonathan Harvey   There was a fisherman, who lived in a village on a great bay, into which he and the other fishermen of the village would take their boats out every morning to let fall their nets The bay was so sheltered, so calm, that the fishermen could call to one another over the water, their voices clear in the damp air, especially on a spring morning such as this was, with white mist hanging over the sea and a faint crescent moon still visible on the wide blue-grey sky They had not long been out this morning Not long at all Now was no time to be heading home, but he saw them, all the rest, his friends, turn their prows back towards the village He shouted to them, but received no answer   Soon he was alone   On a whim he decided to aim for the other side of the bay from the village, a place where pinewoods came down to the sand   He landed, pulled his boat up onto the crunching beach and then, when that was done, became aware of music, something between the shimmering chime of small bells and the luminous breath of panpipes There were also flowers floating down, he could not tell from where, flowers of colours he had never seen before And there was a growing fragrance, an infinite sweetness   Then he saw it, iridescent and caught in the branches of one of the trees ahead, undulating in the breeze and turning from gold to ultramarine to purple to deep green As he walked slowly towards it the scent grew, and after he had reached up and taken it out of the tree he placed it against his face, its exquisite softness, how it seemed to be cool and warm at the same time, how colours slowly moved through it, how it smelt of lavender and oranges and anis and walnut leaves and the neck of his beloved   Stop, said the spirit-being That cloak is mine That feather cloak is mine   I found it, said the fisherman   You cannot wear

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

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

fiction

Issue No. 18

Don't Give Up the Fight

Osama Alomar

TR. C. J. Collins

fiction

Issue No. 18

  DON’T GIVE UP THE FIGHT   While cavorting in a field, the wild horse felt overjoyed to see...

fiction

August 2013

Foxy

Siân Melangell Dafydd

fiction

August 2013

If you don’t want to lose your eyes, grab them by the veins sticking out of their behinds and...

 

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