Date/Time: Tuesday 7 March 2023, 5.30pm

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University

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All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 28 February. To reserve your place click the booking link below or telephone our booking voicemail line 0191 208 6136.

Hosted by Alex Pheby

Professor Preti Taneja taught writing to men in high security prisons for three years. Her programme co-ordinator was Jack Merritt, one of those killed in a terrorist atrocity at Fishmonger’s Hall in 2019: she later discovered the perpetrator was one of her former students. In this lecture, Preti thinks through terror to consider leading Black feminist and prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba’s dictum that ‘hope is a discipline’, and explores the ethics, aesthetics and politics of making narrative towards hope in a time of complex and highly racialised trauma in the UK.

Biography

Preti Taneja is Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Her first novel, We That Are Young a translation of King Lear set in contemporary India, won the 2018 Desmond Elliott Prize for the year's best literary debut and was listed for awards including the Folio Prize and the Prix Jan Michalski. Her second, Aftermath a non fiction lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief following the London Bridge terror attack, was a New Yorker best book of the year and a New Statesman book of the year. It won the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize for literature that is ‘fearless in ambition and execution.’