Helen Marten

Helen Maten's debut novel, The Boiled in Between is a novel told in the action of persistence and questioning: how the rhythms of a world built upon metaphor and symbolism can collide with relationships personal and domestic. 

Spliced between three voices, the narrative is a project always in movement, its characters traversing the in-betweens. The psychic excitement of wind, dust and weather merge with alchemical interior voices, all of them indexes of the universe's microscopic pornography, a fitful map of language and human systems. Philosophic and tactile, humorous and unrelenting, The Boiled in Between ignites new meaning for people and terms of living that have long ceased to astonish us. 

‘A cosmos emerges in the work of Helen Marten, we know it and we don’t. We know it all, but the All that it becomes, we do not know. It pulls you in and right away it pushes you back again. Everything is familiar and nothing, that is the work of this artist: Creating the Nothing, which in this case is everything. Everyone reads something else, everyone sees something else. And yet, it is familiar to everyone, just differently, and this is exactly what creates this familiarity, a trust in the other, through the other, that becomes something else.’ – Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature