PRETI TANEJA
Preti Taneja is a writer and activist. Her debut novel WE THAT ARE YOUNG is a translation of KING LEAR set in contemporary India, and her second book is AFTERMATH, a lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief. Her writing has been published in The White Review, the Guardian, Vogue India, the New Statesman and in anthologies of short stories, essays, literary criticism and prose poetry.
Preti has taught writing in prisons, worked with arts practitioners around the world mediating their own conflict and post conflict zones, and with young people across deprived parts of the UK who want to get published.
She is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Newcastle.
As a New Generation Thinker, she broadcasts for Radio 3 and 4 on world literature and culture.
With Ben Crowe she co-founded ERA Films, a collective working on issues as diverse as Iraq’s refugee crisis, in Rwanda with survivors of the genocide and with women in slum areas of Nairobi, Kenya and on major interactive multimedia documentaries including on migrant workers' rights.
With Kristen Harrison of THE CURVED HOUSE, Preti co founded and edits VISUAL VERSE, the anthology of art and words, bringing the freshest new writing from around the world to a global audience.
She is a Contributing Editor for The White Review magazine, and for the multi-award winning independent press AND OTHER STORIES for which she accepts submissions of full manuscripts.
Judge, The White Review Short Story Prize (2021)
Chair of judges for National Centre for Writing's Desmond Elliott Prize (2020)
Judge, the inaugural Orwell Prize in Political Fiction (2019)
Readings:
Preti has been invited to speak about WE THAT ARE YOUNG at festivals around the world including Adelaide Writer's Week, Hay Festival, Edinburgh Festival, Jaipur Literary Festival, Livres sur les Quais, Morges Switzerland, Brooklyn Book Festival, Kolkata Lit Fest, Kolkata Lit Meet, Hyderabad Lit Fest, Atta Galata Bangalore, Greenwich Book Fest (UK), Milton Keynes Literary Festival, Primadonna Festival (UK), Kenilworth Book Festival.
And in bookshop events including Shakespeare and Company (Paris), City Lights, (San Francisco), Politics and Prose (Washington DC), Elliott Bay Book Co (Seattle)
And in universitys including: Yale, Harvard (MIT), John's Hopkins, Vassar College, Cambridge, Newcastle, Dublin, with keynote addresses at the British Shakespeare Association Annual Conference (2019) and World Shakespeare Congress (2021). She will give a British Academy Lecture at Leeds University in 2021.
WRITER IN RESIDENCE:
SEAGULL BOOKS, KOLKATA (2020)
TIDE: TRAVEL and TRANSCULTURAL IDENTITY in the EARLY MODERN PERIOD, THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD (2020)
UNESCO Fellow in Prose Fiction - University of East Anglia (2019)
image by Rory O' Bryen