Staff Profile
Professor Preti Taneja
Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing
- Email: preti.taneja@ncl.ac.uk
- Personal Website: www.preti-taneja.co.uk
My first novel WE THAT ARE YOUNG (UK: Galley Beggar Press, 2017) re-imagines Shakespeare's King Lear in contemporary India and was critically acclaimed as 'a masterpiece' (the Spectator). It is published in India by Penguin, in the USA by AA Knopf, and is in translation into several languages.
WE THAT ARE YOUNG won the Desmond Elliott Prize 2018 for the UK's best debut novel, and the Eastern Eye Award for literature. It was shortlisted for the Books are My Bag Readers Choice Awards, the Republic of Consciousness Prize, (UK) and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize (India), and longlisted for the Jhalak Prize, the Rathbones Folio Prize (UK) and the Prix Jan Michalski, Europe's premier award for a work of world literature.
It was an Amazon Book of the Month, and Book of the Year in the Sunday Times, Spectator, Guardian (UK), Library Journal (USA) and of the decade in The Hindu (India). It was awarded Starred Reviews in Kirkus, Library Journal and Publisher's Weekly (USA).
I have been invited to speak about the novel around the world including at Adelaide Writer's Week, The Jaipur Literature Festival, Lit Cologne, Edinburgh Festival, Hay Festival and Cambridge Literary Festival.
Keynote lectures on WE THAT ARE YOUNG/ Shakespeare and Human Rights/ AFTERMATH
- 2022: Yale University Humanities Colloquium: Keynote and masterclass
- 2022: British Academy Annual Lecture, Leeds University Humanities Research Institute
- 2021: World Shakespeare Congress, Singapore, Keynote
- 2020: Yale University: South Asian Writes - Lecture, Seminar, Reading
- 2019: British Shakespeare Association, Swansea University, Keynote
- 2019: Warwick Translates (Summer School) Warwick University, Keynote
- 2019: CELSA- Université Paris-Sorbonne, Keynote
- 2018: Stanford University: One-week residency: Lectures and Readings
- 2018: John's Hopkins University Writing Seminars: Reading/ Q&A
- 2018: MIT/ Harvard Women in Renaissance Theatre: Lecture
Residencies and Fellowships:
- Writer in Residence, TIDE (Travel and Transcultural Identity in Early Modern England 1500-1700) University of Oxford, 2020
- Seagull Books Writer in Residence, 2020
- UNESCO Fellow in Prose Fiction, University of East Anglia, 2019
- Fellow Commoner, Jesus College, University of Cambridge
- AHRC/ BBC New Generation Thinker broadcasting for Radio 3 and 4 on world literature and culture.
Teaching: I supervise at PhD level and I devised and teach the MA Module craft prose with a focus on intersectionality and anti-racism. I teach Creative Writing across all undergraduate stages, and I have previously taught students of all ages and backgrounds including three years inside HMP Whitemoor, one of the UK's few high security men's prisons.
Editing: I co founded and edit VISUAL VERSE, the online anthology of art and words.
I am a Contributing Editor for the award winning small press AND OTHER STORIES and for the leading literary magazine, The White Review.
Films: With Ben Crowe I co-wrote The man who met himself, nominated for the short film Palme D'Or at the Festival de Cannes 2005, and the feature film Verity's Summer (2010) which was shot on the Northumberland Coast. We co-founded ERA Films making interactive multimdedia for major impact academic research projects, NGOs, Trade Union bodies and medium and small charities. We have worked on issues as diverse as cultural rights in conflicts, language and loss, Iraq’s refugee crisis, in Rwanda with survivors of the genocide and with women in slum areas of Nairobi, Kenya and on migrant workers' rights worldwide as well as with socio-economically disadvantaged communities across the UK.
Public service to Literature/ The Arts
- 2022 - appointed co-chair of English PEN's Translation Advisory Group
- 2022 - Judge, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize (prose)
- 2021 - Judge, The White Review short story prize
- 2020 - Board of Advisers, Shadow Heroes
- 2020 - Chair of Judges, The Desmond Elliott Prize
- 2019 - Judge, the inaugural Orwell Prize for Political Fiction
- 2018 - Judge, Galley Beggar Press short story prize
- 2015-19 - Trustee, Tara Arts
Background
From 1996-1999 I studied Theology, Religion and Philosophy of Religion with Sanskrit at St John's College, University of Cambridge.
In 2000, I was awarded a PGDip in Print Journalism from City University, funded by the Guardian's Scott Trust Bursary.
I have worked as a carer, a youth counsellor and as a Programme Manager at a grassroots youth charity.
From 2006-10 I was a journalist and editor at a research-based minority rights NGO, primarily covering the US-lead invasion of Iraq in 2003, and its impact on Iraq's religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities.
Alongside this I completed a part-time MA in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway University of London.
In 2010 I was able to pursue a full-time PhD in Creative Writing with the support of RHUL's Reid Scholarship, where I researched and wrote the first draft of WE THAT ARE YOUNG.
Current Research Interests:
- Supply chain economics and racial justice in the UK food industry and rise of supermarkets from the 1990s
- Creative non fiction, form, intertextuality and intersectionality
- Race, decolonisation, culture and literature in modern and contemporary Britain and America
- World literature in Englishes including by Black and Asian British and racially minoritised writers
- Literature in translation into English
- Intersections and interventions of culture as challenge to human and minority rights discourse and abrogations in conflict and postconflict situations in the 20th and 21st Centuries (particularly Kashmir)
- Modern and contemporary prison writing, prison poetics
- Global modernisms, particularly British Asian and South Asian modernism
- The writing and thought of JM Coetzee
- Shakespeare in translation of language and form in the 20th and 21st Century, with a focus on interdisciplinary/ legal, conflict and human rights studies
Research Profile:
2021 - Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing, Newcastle University
2020-21 - Lecturer in Creative Writing, Newcastle University
2017-19: Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship, Warwick University: Shakespeare and Human Rights
Shakespeare and Human Rights considers the production, performance and reception of Shakespeare's plays when they are in translations of language and form, by people using culture to mediate their own conflict and postconflict zone issues. Six case studies were gathered from Kosovo-Serbia, Germany, Jordan-Syria, Kashmir, Spain-Catalonia and the UK. The period of focus for this project was 2014-16, two major years for Shakespeare commemoration in the Anglophone world.
Co-supervisor, MA Module: Writing Wrongs (Creative Practice and Human Rights)
2014-16 Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Global Shakespeare, University of Warwick and QMUL.
2014-19 Fellow Commoner, Jesus College, Cambridge University
2010-13 PhD in Creative Writing, Royal Holloway, University of London.
I am currently Degree Programme Director for the MA in Creative Writing.
I welcome PhD proposals from interdisciplinary and intersectional fiction, creative non fiction, and prose-poetry writers particularly from British Black and Asian backgrounds, as well as international writers interested in working in the UK.
I am currently supervising PhDs in Ocean and Imagination, non fiction narratives on the Atlantic Ocean and the Law of the Sea, and in YA feminist fantasy fiction.
I lead/ teach on the following modules:
Taught PGR:
SEL8321 MA Portfolio - Supervisor
SEL8677 CRAFT: Prose - Module Leader
SEL 8640 - Profession of Writing - masterclass
SEL 8641 - Process second marker
UG:
SEL227 Prose Workshop - Module Leader
SEL3400 Prose Portfolio - Module Leader/ Supervisor
SEL 1000 Introduction to Creative Writing - masterclass
- Taneja PMN. Aftermath. Oakland, CA, USA: Transit Books, 2021.
- Taneja P, Lucas G. Interview with Preti Taneja. Shakespeare 2020, 17(1), 143-153.
- Taneja P. We That Are Young. Norwich, UK: Galley Beggar Press, 2017.
- Taneja P. I, Jay (short story). In: Fernyhough C, ed. Others: Writers on the Power of Words to Help Us See Beyond Ourselves. London: Unbound, 2019.
- Taneja P. Kumkum Malhotra. Norwich: Gatehouse Press, 2015.
- Taneja P. A King Lear Sutra. In: Diana Henderson, ed. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Bloomsbury, Arden, 2020. In Preparation.
- Taneja P, McWatt T. Shame on Me: Preti Taneja in Conversation with Tessa McWatt. Feminist Review 2020, 126(1), 139-145.
- Taneja P. King Lear and Gender Justice in India. In: David Ruiter, ed. The Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Social Justice. Bloomsbury, Arden, 2020. In Preparation.
- Taneja P. Breaking Curfew, Presenting Utopia: Vishal Bhardwaj’s Haider Inside the National and International Legal Framework. In: Devansundaram A, ed. Indian Cinema Beyond Bollywood. London: Routledge, 2018.
- Taneja P. Such a long journey: Rohinton Mistry’s Parsi King Lear from Fiction to Film. In: Trivedi P; Chakravarti P, ed. Shakespeare and Indian Cinemas: Local Habitations. London: Routledge, 2018, pp.143-161.
- Taneja P. Fiction and the Possibility of the ethical: rewriting Shakespeare and the watchful gaze of Gayatri Spivak. In: Rivière E; Dobson M, ed. Rewriting Shakespeare's plays for and by the contemporary stage. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017.
- Taneja P. Does Shakespeare's Text Even Matter?. In: Panja S; Saraf BM, ed. Performing Shakespeare in India: Exploring Indianness, Literatures and Cultures. India: SAGE Publishing, 2016, pp.175-190.
- Taneja P. Reclaiming the Mahabharata: Gandhari, (short play) Performed at Tara Theatre, London 2018. 2018. Tara Theatre, London 2018.
- Taneja P. Start the Week: India's Rise?. 2017. London: BBC Radio 4, 43 mins.
- Taneja P. Proms Plus: 1969, The Sound of a Summer. 2019. London: Royal Albert Hall, BBC Radio 3, 32 minutes.
- Taneja P. Free Thinking: Language and Belonging. 2019. London: BBC Radio 3, 45 minutes.
- Taneja P. Private Passions. 2019. London: BBC Radio 3, 34 mins.
- Taneja P. Writing Music: on Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. 2018. London: BBC Radio 3, 14 mins.
- Taneja P. Free Thinking: The rise of translation and the death of foreign language learning. 2018. London: BBC Radio 3, 45 mins.
- Taneja P. Partition: Novelists' views of India and Pakistan now. 2017. London: BBC Radio 4, 45 mins.
- Taneja P. The Essay - Creating Modern India. 2017. London: BBC Radio 3, 19 mins.
- Taneja P. What does 'Global Shakespeare' mean?. 2014. London: BBC Radio 3, 43 mins.
- Taneja P. Manto: Uncovering Pakistan. 2016. London: BBC Radio 4, 27 mins.