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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...

My job during the war was to administer beatings This didn’t make me better than anyone else, particularly not the people I beat To ensure that I never forgot this, I was periodically beaten myself I, Laura Grimsey, a White, beaten quite roughly but within official boundaries by a Brown A team of Browns was retained expressly for this purpose: to beat the beaters   I celebrated my two-year work anniversary the week the war circus arrived This was by chance also the ten-year anniversary of the war effort itself The economy was soaring To celebrate in a traditional manner, the Bureau had received a shipment of commemorative tin helmets and tin flasks, and at the entrance to the war circus’s big top tent, spectators were handed tiny tin keyrings fashioned in the shape of a nuclear warhead with every circus programme Whites and Browns flocked to the war circus together, flush with anniversary bonuses and promotions In tribute to the unsinkable camaraderie of our army, the Whites and Browns bought each other pails of popcorn from the clown shuffling between the stands with a plastic tube of fluffy kernels braced like a sandbag across her shoulders   #   The War Machine Speaks with a Liquorice Tongue   Immigration, boy Can’t fault the Browns, far better off as they were loping through deserts and savannahs Hunting that big game under their own God-given sun Unafraid of what sails down from the sky But here we are Here we are We can only get on with it Come together, all of us patriots White Brown No matter We know our bombs the way we know our lovers The Annabelle The Betsy The Claudette In the armament factories we bellow out love songs Hands percuss metal shells We forget whose voice is White Whose Brown We’re lucky to have steady jobs What’s more, bonuses Britain Britain First Britain first  

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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Prize Entry

April 2017

Birch

Thomas Chadwick

Prize Entry

April 2017

1997   Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive....

fiction

Issue No. 3

Fifteen Flowers

Federico Falco

TR. Janet Hendrickson

fiction

Issue No. 3

To Lilia Lardone Summer was ending. The air already smelled like smoke, but it still looked clear, sunny. The...

Art

November 2015

None of this is Real

Anna Coatman

Art

November 2015

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar. Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney...

 

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