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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...

It is a cliché to say that a writer’s work resists classification It is ironic then that China Miéville, among the most ambitious, imaginative and unconventional novelists at work in the world today, should so actively endorse his own writing’s categorisation by genre   A three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction, Miéville has since the publication of his début novel King Rat in 1998 achieved a level of critical and commercial success that the literary establishment is apt to characterise as an ascent from the ghetto of genre fiction Yet he remains avowedly a writer of science fiction and fantasy, and one among an increasingly influential group of authors operating outside the parameters of ‘literary fiction’, that most tautological and self-denying of styles The energy, experimentalism and intellectual radicalism of novels such as Iron Council – described by the Washington Post as an ‘elegiac paean to utopian socialism, romantic revolutionaries and the European radical tradition’ – reminds us of the artificiality of any distinction between historic ‘genre’ writers such as Philip K Dick, M John Harrison or H P Lovecraft and those equally nonconformist fabulists such as Jonathan Swift, Jorge Luis Borges and J G Ballard who have been afforded the recognition of the canon   The author of ten novels, including three works in the Bas-Lag series that takes its name from the fictional world in which it is set, Miéville’s recent masterpiece Embassytown typifies his ability to marry the construction of a fantastic universe to the exploration of an idea This is a story about the dangerously intoxicating capacities of language, expressed in the prose of a writer himself in thrall to the possibilities offered by vocabulary, metaphor and simile Ursula K Le Guin wrote of the book that it ‘works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being’ The same qualities are evident in The City and the City, which presents the reader with an urban landscape

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

Issue No. 3

Forkhead Box

Jeremy M. Davies

fiction

Issue No. 3

What interests me most is that Schaumann, the state executioner, bred mice. In his spare time. Sirens, ozone, exhaust...

feature

December 2011

Egyptian Revolution: Bloody Wednesday (2 February 2011)

Omar Robert Hamilton

feature

December 2011

Almost one year on from the first battles in Tahrir Square, Egypt’s future remains uncertain. Many Egyptians believe that,...

fiction

August 2017

Lengths

Matthew Perkins

fiction

August 2017

1   I sat at the kitchen table while Valentine prepared cups of flowery, smoky loose leaf tea. Antoine...

 

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