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Preti Taneja
PRETI TANEJA is a writer and activist, and Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, UK. Her novel WE THAT ARE YOUNG (Galley Beggar Press) won the UK’s Desmond Elliott Prize, and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize, Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize (India) and Europe’s premier award for a work of world literature, the Prix Jan Michalski. It has been translated into several languages and is published in the USA by AA Knopf. Her new book, AFTERMATH on the language of trauma, terror, prison and abolition is part of the Undelivered Lecturers series from Transit Books USA, and will be published in the UK by And Other Stories in April 2022.


Articles Available Online


Order, Order

Essay

December 2021

Preti Taneja

Essay

December 2021

‘INQUESTS INTO THE DEATHS ARISING FROM THE FISHMONGERS’ HALL AND LONDON BRIDGE TERROR ATTACK CASE MANAGEMENT’1   with asides, insertions, questions and other patterns...

Fiction

Issue No. 30

HOTEL STATIONARY (AND THIS IS THAT)

Preti Taneja

Fiction

Issue No. 30

And the night John Berger died, I, Maria, pale shadow, the youngest sister of Sabine, was walking the city....

‘An essay’s heat is interior’, writes Cynthia Ozick in ‘She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body’ When I first came across Ozick’s piece in The Atlantic (later to serve as her introduction to the 1998 issue of the Best American Essays series), the title gave me great hope This is the writer, after all, who famously asked Norman Mailer what colour ink he dips his balls in Yes, the essay as a woman, the essay as a body, flesh and blood: vulnerable, resilient, proud, secretive, rebellious, surprising ‘A warm body’ can mean a placeholder, a stand-in, filler, an innocuous form carefully placed to occupy space – a neutral, affable presence But here, I thought, the warm body must be something else: an indentation left in the sheets, a fleeting form of hotness, words burned into the ether, a radiant, unapologetic scorch mark; but also with grim suggestions of the cadaver, as in, the body was still warm   Ozick’s essay was in fact slightly more tepid than I had imagined She was interested in the essay as the formal embodiment of a female protagonist who gives voice to the ‘sensations of the self’: ‘she is there, a living voice She takes us in’ Still, the idea of the essay as a potentially incendiary form has stayed with me, and something about Ozick’s proposal seems radical and exciting It’s as if the essay is alive in a way that other forms are not; as if it possesses human traits and bodily characteristics, making it particularly supple and fitting when it comes to writing about certain conditions or experiences What might this look like on the page? Two recent debut essay collections offer some interesting possibilities ‘How much can a body endure? Almost everything,’ Chelsea Hodson asks and rejoinders in, Tonight I’m Someone Else ‘Sometimes it seems that you don’t know your body at all The names and locations of things You need someone else to tell you what your body is doing,’ writes Ashleigh Young in Can You Tolerate This? Though markedly different from each other in tone and temperament,

Contributor

February 2020

Preti Taneja

Contributor

February 2020

PRETI TANEJA is a writer and activist, and Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University, UK. Her...

In conversation: Preti Taneja and Gina Apostol

Feature

February 2020

Gina Apostol

Preti Taneja

Feature

February 2020

Adelaide, Writers Week, March 2019. It was 41 degrees, and it was the furthest I have ever flown. I was standing at the fringes...

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poetry

Issue No. 13

Watermen

Holly Pester

poetry

Issue No. 13

It’s Saturday and two men arrive at the door in the uniform. Thames Water. We’re checking the whole street,...

fiction

April 2012

They Told the Story from the Lighthouse

Chimene Suleyman

fiction

April 2012

I found Margate watching the sea. And I walked the streets thinking they had left it sometime in the...

poetry

Issue No. 3

Glow Me Out

Rikudah Potash

TR. Michael Casper

poetry

Issue No. 3

In the fiery cosmos Out of which you made             Timna Glow me in...

 

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