little scratch: Rebecca Watson in Conversation with Helen Charman

Join us as we welcome Rebecca Watson and Helen Charman to celebrate the publication of little scratch, Rebecca’s much-anticipated debut novel. The event will be streaming via Instagram Live.

little scratch tells the story of a day in the life of an unnamed woman, living in a lower-case world of demarcated fridge shelves and office politics; clock-watching and WhatsApp notifications. In a voice that is fiercely wry, touchingly delicate and increasingly neurotic, the protagonist relays what it takes to get through the quotidian detail of that single trajectory – from morning to night – while processing recent sexual violence.

little scratch is about the coexistence of monotony with our waking, intelligent lives. It is a powerful evocation of how the external and internal aspects of our lives exist in a helix, and what it means to live out the course of a single day consumed by trauma.

Rebecca Watson is Assistant Arts Editor at the Financial Times. Her work has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and Granta. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize.

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her second pamphlet Daddy Poem was shortlisted for the 2019 Ivan Juritz Prize; her latest, In the Pleasure Dairy, is published by Sad Press. Her first nonfiction book, Mother State—a political history of motherhood—is forthcoming from Allen Lane. She teaches English Literature at Durham University, and is an associate member of staff at Camberwell College of Arts and the Glasgow School of Art. As resident commissioning editor at MAP magazine, she is running the year-long TENANCY project.