Interviews

3AM magazine: The Pram in The Hallway

Helen Walsh’s debut, Brass won the Betty Trask prize in 2005 and her follow-up, Once Upon a Time in England –an unflinching portrayal of the devastating impact of rape, racism and poverty on one family–won the Somerset Maugham Prize in 2009. Walsh has never shirked from examining the messier, murkier aspects of human existence, and her latest novel, Go to Sleep, holds the largely unwritten subject of postnatal sleep deprivation up to the light. Walsh depicts a nightmarish, hallucinatory world of fractured existence and extreme emotion which many will relate to. As always, she writes with purity and precision, skewering contemporary constructions of race, class and motherhood while unintentionally encouraging the robust use of reliable contraception. Read more

Liverpool Echo: The Dark Side of Motherhood

Dawn Collinson talks to the author whose post natal depression inspired her latest novel talks to the author whose post natal depression inspired her latest novel SITTING in a post-natal group, amid the supposed security of other new mothers, Helen Walsh finally felt ready to admit the feelings she’d desperately hidden. “I thought this would be the place where I could go and say ‘do you know what? I’m finding this really hard and it doesn’t match my expectations at all.’ But when I put my hand up and said it, I was met with this total wall of silence.” Angry and bitterly disappointed by their response, or lack of it, the author turned to writing as an outlet for her frustration. Read More Read more

Liverpool ECHO: I don't think I was ever mainstream

Helen Walsh has moved the goal-posts for her second novel. From the Liverpool welter of sex, drugs and rock and roll which saw her marked out as the female Irvine Welsh she has retreated to the confines of her satellite home town for a follow-up cocktail of politics and domestic desperation, laced with a heady shot of racism. Read more

3am Magazine: This is England

As a writer I’ve always been interested in the idea of damage, our strategies for dealing with it, surviving it, resisting it. All the Fitzgeralds (my fictional family) are damaged in some way, all of them victims of one harrowing, brutal event that takes place very early on in the novel. Read more

Scotland on Sunday: Goodbye to Muck and Brass

Helen Walsh never claimed Brass was wholly autobiographical. But she knew Liverpool's seamy underbelly, what it was like to drop her first E before her first period or first kiss – and she knew about girl-on-girl sex. All of this helped Brass become a cult hit. She rode the wave of her own succès de scandale, giving good quote at every turn, but the hype could have buried her. Instead, here she is in Liverpool with a new book and, to some extent, a different woman. Read more

The List: England's Dreaming

Helen Walsh has lived a little. At 13, while her classmates in Warrington were flicking throughSmash Hits, she was swept up in the early 90s euphoria of acid house and ecstasy. At 16, as most girls her age sat their GCSEs, she was hooked on cocaine and receiving death threats from dealers. Read more

The Independent: Young, gifted, bold as brass

Four years and a few life-changes later she is back with Once Upon a Time in England – a very different but equally unsettling book. Whereas Brass was suffused with the rich language and grubby glamour of Liverpool's inner-city badlands, the suburban setting of Once Upon a Time... gives it a very different tone. Read more