Charlotte Raven
Charlotte Raven was a British author and journalist. She was named one of the BBC's 100 Women in 2013. She was awarded the Christopher Bland Prize in 2021 for the book she wrote, with her doctor, about her diagnosis of Huntington's Disease.
Early life and career
Born in Streatham, South London on 4 September 1969, Raven studied English at the University of Manchester. As a Labour Club activist there in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she was part of a successful campaign to oust then student union communications officer Derek Draper, though she subsequently had a four-year relationship with him. She was University of Manchester Students' Union Women's Officer from 1990 until 1991 and presided over an election in which future Labour MP Liam Byrne failed to be elected as the Union's Welfare Officer. She later studied at the University of Sussex.Raven was a contributor to the Modern Review, and the editor of the relaunched version in 1997. There she met Julie Burchill, with whom she had an affair in 1995: the two are pictured in the National Portrait Gallery. Her columns appeared frequently in The Guardian and New Statesman.
In 2001, Raven was accused of regional racism after launching an attack on Denise Fergus, the mother of child murder victim James Bulger, and the people of Liverpool in general, in a Guardian article on the James Bulger case. The article generated a high level of complaints. In response, Guardian readers' editor Ian Mayes concluded that the article should not have been published.
In April 2013, it was announced that the feminist magazine Spare Rib would relaunch with Raven as the editor. It was subsequently announced that while a magazine and website were to be launched, it would have a different name.
Personal life and death
Raven and her husband, filmmaker Tom Sheahan, had two children. They divorced in 2016.In January 2010, she revealed that she had been diagnosed with Huntington's disease, an incurable hereditary disease, in January 2006 and had been contemplating suicide, an option she rejected after visiting a clinic in an area of Venezuela with a very high incidence of Huntington's disease. In 2019, she became patient 1 on the Roche Gen-Peak trial of a huntingtin protein-lowering drug tominersen. In 2021, she published a memoir, Patient 1, with her doctor Edward Wild on the experience of coming to terms with the diagnosis, the drug trial and the living with the illness as it affected her mind and body. Raven was shortlisted for the 2022 Royal Society of Literature Christopher Bland Prize for the book.
Raven died of Huntington's disease on 22 January 2025, at the age of 55.