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Staff Profile

Professor Preti Taneja

Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing

Background

I am the Director of the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts (NCLA) www.ncla.ac.uk providing an exciting public and student programme of FREE literary events and conversations with some of the most important and groundbreaking writers of theatre, film, poetry and prose working today. All are welcome!


I am away on sabbatical from Oct-Jan 2023-2024. Current and prospective PhD students may contact me via email.


In 2023, I was appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, I received the Philip Leverhulme Prize for Languages and Literatures in recognition of my experimental creative practice and to work on my third book and fourth books, a novel and work of creative non fiction.


My most recent book, AFTERMATH (Transit Books, 2021/ And Other Stories, 2022) is a non-fiction lament against the racist harms of the school to prison pipeline, and corresponding white savior fantasy of education-as-redemption in the UK. The book interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Following the terror attack at Fishmonger's Hall in November 2019, I contend with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, and draw on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is an attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition. Aftermath is the winner of the Gordon Burn Prize 2022, awarded for literature that is 'fearless in ambition and execution.'


     'Aftermath is a major landmark in British narrative non-fiction' - Max Porter


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 finest literary debut of the year, 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) and was a New York Public Library pick for Book of the Day.


I have been invited to speak about my writing l around the world including at Ledbury Poetry Festival, Adelaide Writer's Week, Brooklyn Book Festival, The Jaipur Literature Festival, Lit Cologne, Edinburgh Festival, Hay Festival and Cambridge Literary Festival.

My prose poetry is featured in the new PENGUIN BOOK OF INDIAN POETS ed. Jeet Thayil, and my writing has appeared in Granta, The White Review, Bad Form, the Guardian, the New Statesman, INQUE and the LA Review of Books.

Selected keynote lectures and masterclasses on WE THAT ARE YOUNG/ Shakespeare and Human Rights/ AFTERMATH

  • 2023: The American Library in Paris: 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: 

  • West Dean College Writer in Residence, 2023
  • 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 teach on the MA in prose, always 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: In 2013 I co founded VISUAL VERSE, the online anthology of art and words. Visual Verse ran for 10 years, inviting and creating a global community of artists and writers to respond to art with words in a celebration of the creative process and the power and potential of ekphrasis. Visual Verse is now archived online at NCLA, showcasing a decade of the freshest new writing from some of the most exciting contemporary voices in Anglophone literature. The archive is freely accessible to all.


I am a Contributing Editor for the award winning small press AND OTHER STORIES and for the (now closed) 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


  • 2023 - appointed as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL)
  • 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.

In 2014-19 I held a postdoctorial fellowship in global Shakespeare, then a Leverhulme Early Career Research fellowship at QMUL/ Warwick University researching my project Shakespeare and Human Rights which looked at translations of the plays in language and form in conflict and post conflict zones including Serbia and Kosovo, Jordan and Syria, Kashmir, Germany, and Spain.







Research


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

2014 BBC/ AHRC New Generation thinker

2010-13 PhD in Creative Writing, Royal Holloway, University of London.




 

Teaching

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 supervise PhDs in CREATIVE WRITING ONLY, and am currently supervising projects including:

Ocean and Imagination, non fiction narratives on the Atlantic Ocean and the Law of the Sea (non fiction) by Alison Reid

Islamophobia, multiple choice and theatre of the oppressed (a novel) by Javeria Kausar

The Orissa Famine (poetry) by Anita Pati

Two of these projects have received full funding from the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership.


I lead/ teach on the following modules:

Taught PGR:

SEL8321 MA Portfolio - Supervisor

SEL8505 MA Prose Workshop - Module Leader

SEL 8640 - Profession of Writing - masterclass

SEL 8641 - Process second marker


UG:

SEL2227 Prose Workshop - Module Leader

SEL3400 Prose Portfolio - Module Leader/ Supervisor

SEL 1000 Introduction to Creative Writing - masterclass

SEL2215 - Creative Practice - Co-Teach


Publications