Helen Dunmore

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Standard Name: Dunmore, Helen
Birth Name: Helen Dunmore
Married Name: Helen Charnley
HD first established herself as a poet, but became internationally known as a novelist when she won the Orange Prize in 1996. A prolific writer, she also had considerable success with books for children.
Colour photograph of Helen Dunmore opening the refurbished Henleaze Library in Redland, Bristol. in April 2008. She stands looking to her right with a couple of the audience visible behind her. Her pale blonde hair falls straight along her shoulders, and she wears a silver and zebra-print blouse.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Jo Shapcott
JS had already appeared with Helen Dunmore and Matthew Sweeney in 1997 in Penguin Modern Poets volume 12. Writing by her was included in three anthologies in the year 2001. Andrew Motion placed her work...
Anthologization Elizabeth Jennings
The Leamington Poetry Society published a 4-page leaflet (plus cover) of EJ 's poems, titled with her name, in March 1987.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online.
Twelve years later the British Council published an audiocassette of poetry which features her...
Anthologization Hilary Mantel
With many others including Charlotte Bingham , Edwina Currie , Helen Dunmore , Nicci Gerrard , Wendy Holden , David Lodge , Val McDermid , Joanna Trollope , Lynne Truss , and Salley Vickers ,...
Anthologization Jo Shapcott
JS was, with Helen Dunmore , U. A. Fanthorpe , and Elizabeth Jennings , one of the four poets featured in no. 5 of the audio-cassette series The Poetry Quartets, issued today by the...
Intertextuality and Influence Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre has been filmed repeatedly for both television and the cinema, as well as being made the subject of musicals, plays, and a ballet performed by the London Children's Ballet in 1997 and 2008...
Literary responses Marina Warner
This amazingly complex novel received very positive reviews in Britain. Helen Dunmore in The Times called the plot huge and vigorous and the novel rewarding, incisive and topical.
Marina Warner: Novelist and Mythographer.
Times Literary Supplement reviewer Ruth Scurr
Literary responses Catherine Byron
Critics praised CB generously for this collection. A fellow-poet, Helen Dunmore in Poetry Review, called her a taut, brilliantly focussed . . . very exact poet,
“Advertisement: The Getting of Vellum. Poems by Catherine Byron; About the Poet; Sample Poem; Reviews”. Salmon Poetry Online Bookshop.
and critic Adrian Henri declared her remarkable for...
Literary responses Kate Clanchy
Helen Dunmore , on the cover, imagines that KC may become a genuinely popular poet, not because she writes down to her audience, but because she writes about what we know in such a way...
Literary responses Kate Clanchy
Lucy Scholes wrote: The gloriously heady heat, high-running tempers and emotions are offset by the cool lightness of Clanchy's prose . . . . Meeting the English is an utter delight.
Scholes, Lucy. “Short Reviews. Meeting the English, Kate Clanchy”. The Observer, p. 41.
41
Helen Dunmore called...
Literary responses Catherine Cookson
At one time, CC titles constituted one third of all the books loaned by Britain's public libraries.
Collini, Stefan. “The Cookson Story”. London Review of Books, pp. 33 - 5.
33
With 123 million copies sold by the end of 1998,
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
320
she was one of the best-selling...
Literary responses Ruth Fainlight
The younger poet Helen Dunmore , reviewing this book, found RF 's voice capable of being cutting as well as lyrical, particularly when addressing the topics of the apparatus of femininity, and of growing older.A...
Literary responses Judith Kazantzis
Helen Dunmore wrote in Poetry Review that she found these poems assured, flexible and rich with experience.
Judith Kazantzis.
The TLS review found Kazantzis to be a dominantly visual poet, at her best in short, evocative pieces...
Literary responses Michèle Roberts
Reviewing this novel of considered maturity for the Guardian, Helen Dunmore called MRa magnificent writer of the body and a poet who writes in concise and rhythmically paced prose.
Bianchi, Martha Dickinson, and Emily Dickinson. The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson. Biblo and Tannen, 1971.
11
Literary responses Kamila Shamsie
A review for Transnational Literature noted the serendipitous coincidence which saw this novel published at the centenary of World War I, and noted that KS addresses more than a few of the blind spots in...
Reception Ruth Fainlight
RF has drawn appreciative comment from fellow poets and writers like Helen Dunmore , A. S. Byatt , and Elaine Feinstein (who has written that in a time when every poet is wooed by the...

Timeline

After 18 February 1914
Leonard Woolf published his second novel, The Wise Virgins (which he had begun to write on his honeymoon). Quite different in genre from his first, it is a roman à clef reputedly presenting harsh caricatures...
4 September 1941
German troops laid siege to Leningrad (now St Petersburg).
14 May 2013
The Zoological Society of London (better known as the London Zoo ) launched a series of Writers Talks, in which a professuonal writer joined with a scientist and a zoo-keeper to talk about a particular...