Charlotte Raven, ‘exhilarating’, trail-blazing journalist, dies aged 55
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Raven came to prominence on Modern Review in 1990s and later developed degenerative illness Huntington’s disease. Charlotte Raven, the “exhilarating” journalist who blazed a trail through the 1990s media scene, later writing powerfully about assisted dying after she developed a degenerative illness, has died aged 55.
![[Charlotte Raven in crop top with Julie Burchill shielding her face]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/02167daf5cb79a5c03b2972d24e549521aea0f66/0_688_2311_1386/master/2311.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
Raven was a columnist, author and editor who wrote extensively for the Guardian and New Statesman, later becoming editor-in-chief of the Feminist Times. She first came to prominence in the mid-90s as a writer for the Modern Review, the noisy, era-defining magazine of “low culture for high brows”. She attracted particular attention after she fell in love with its co-founder Julie Burchill, who at the time was married to Cosmo Landesman, another of the magazine’s founders. The relationship won Burchill and Raven brief but intense tabloid interest; a joint portrait by Polly Borland is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.
![[Charlotte Raven at home next to a piano]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/0aa0a47dc6b646269fae279cb4b7e317d67a8c31/1730_232_2879_3598/master/2879.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
“If you can remember the 90s, you weren’t really there,” Raven wrote much later in her memoir, Patient 1. “I remember so little of it that I must have been more there than practically anyone, Liam Gallagher excepted.”. She edited the Modern Review when it briefly relaunched in 1997, and wrote an outspoken column in G2 and elsewhere.
