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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...

This is a transcription of a live fundraiser event for Black liberation organised and hosted by Silver Press on 9 June 2020 ‘Revolution is not a one-time event’ will return as a month-long programme in August, organised by Che Gossett, Lola Olufemi and Sarah Shin     Akwugo Emejulu It’s incredibly exciting to be here, and it’s an honour to be chairing this panel with this amazing group of scholars and activists My name is Akwugo Emejulu, and I’m a professor of sociology at the University of Warwick Before I introduce the panel, I just want to give you a little bit of background as to why we’re here and what we’re hoping to achieve for this event As many of you know, this is the day of George Floyd’s funeral in Houston, Texas In fact, I think it’s actually happening right now So I would like to dedicate this session to George Floyd, to Breonna Taylor, to Atatiana Jefferson, to Sarah Reed, to Sheku Bayoh, to Adama Traore, and all the other countless victims of police violence I think it’s important that we start with that, and say their names    And so before I hand over to this amazing panel, I just want to say a couple of things about my hopes for this discussion I hope that we can be brave, that we can be courageous, that we allow ourselves to think expansively about this idea of abolition, and what freedom looks like, and what care and caretaking and care work looks like I hope that we allow ourselves to have our imaginations run wild, and that we really engage in this speculative dialogue about what a future would look like without police and prisons This is a really amazing opportunity to do this And abolition feminism gives us the framework, the tools and the opportunity for us to desire more and better for ourselves But I think what’s also important to understand — and that’s why we have this great range of both thinkers and activists here — is that while I hope that we are

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

June 2013

What We Did After We Lost 100 Years' Wealth in 24 Months

Agri Ismaïl

fiction

June 2013

‘World finance had, in 2008, a near-death experience.’   The words belong to a partner of a renowned international...

Interview

February 2013

Interview with Wayne Koestenbaum

Charlie Fox

Interview

February 2013

Perhaps what’s gathered here is not an interview at all. Precisely what it is, we’ll think about in a...

fiction

November 2016

The Miserablist

Anne Boyer

fiction

November 2016

This vision was strongly nebulous, an indeterminate but bold reaction only because it was so much like one of...

 

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