Writing

Longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text 2020 (excerpt)

Book of the Day in The Guardian and reviewed in The Observer, World Literature Today and the Sydney Review of Books

A Book of the Year 2025: Lala Books, Stoke Newington Bookshop, Veranda Books, Storysmith Books, Gloucester Road Books, Bookhaus Bookshop, Brick Lane Bookshop Press, Collected Bookshop, In Other Words journal; Book of the Week at Volume Books (New Zealand)

Staff Pick: Shakespeare & Company (Paris), Brunswick Bound Bookshop (Melbourne), Fitzcarraldo Editions, And Other Stories

Taught on/at: MSt Creative Translation, University of Oxford; MFA Writing Program (component Literary Translation at Columbia), Columbia University; MA Literary Translation, UEA; MFA Literary Translation, University of Iowa; MA Publishing, Manchester Metropolitan University; BA Comparative Literature, University of Massachusetts Amherst; BA English, University College Dublin; Bard College Berlin; PhD Creative Writing 'Alternative Criticism Workshop', Newcastle University; 'Hybrid Writing' course, Scottish BPOC Writers Network

Book Group Choice: Goethe-Institut Glasgow (3-weeks), Prismatic Pages (Oslo); Heron Books, Collected Books and Tills Bookshop

Forthcoming 3 November 2026 from Invisible Books (North America)

Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, is a satirical, refreshing and brilliantly playful book about learning the art of translation, being a bookworker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means – and whether it is possible – to make a living as an artist.

“Fair…stands out because of its genuine effort to be for anyone interested in learning more about a literary translator of the anglophone world. It is also remarkable for its thrilling level of creativity […] Calleja’s Fair is energetic, fun, and inspired. Readers learn about a translator and learn to care about her. They, like many fairgoers, will not want the experience to end. They’ll want more.” – Regina Galasso, World Literature Today

“Most publishers don’t even want translators’ names on a book jacket… Calleja’s genre-busting memoir laughs in the face of all that, with cheek and joy.” – Anthony Cummins, The Observer

“Calleja demonstrates through several fascinating and detailed translations in progress [that] shepherding a piece of writing from one language into another requires so many minute responses, thought processes and decisions that the translator would find it impossible to suppress their own voice and experiences; and that if they managed it, the result would probably be worse, inert and undynamic.” – Alex Clark, The Guardian

“I’d recommend this book to all translators, to everyone who’s learning a foreign language, to readers of books in translation, to lovers of language, and to anyone with an open and curious mind. I’ve learnt wonderful ideas and feel enriched by all the different approaches and perspectives within its pages.” – Isabelle Li, Sydney Review of Books

“An accomplished work of hybrid nonfiction… [and] a striking addition to the literary theory of translation.” – Foreword magazine (starred review)

“compelling work […] she’s…vocal about the work of translators and their added value. It’s a message that all readers should understand and the publishing industry should promote, and Fair is a great first base on this important quest” – Esther Lafferty, The Times of Malta

“Translation has traditionally been dominated by academics and gatekept by those who feel translators should be seen and not heard. Calleja, who comes from a working-class background and has firm punk-rock credentials, wishes […] to erase this particular history.” – Dale Shaw, The New World (f.k.a. The New European)

“An ingenious trip around modern translation in the form of a ‘fair’, with stalls and events which allows Calleja to deep dive into how the world of the modern translator necessarily encompasses issues, like pay, process, politics and diversity.” – Steven Long, The Crack

“it is one book that I feel every translator should have on their to-be-read list” – Kathryn Raver, Asymptote

“a tour de force which is funny, angry and accessible to translators (I would imagine) and non-translators (I know) alike” – Liz Dexter, Shiny New Books

“Condensed into perfectly bite-sized chapters, she gifts us an unfiltered view of what it takes to make a living as an artist these days. (I’ve never seen the realities of translator life told with such honesty!) Whether you’re already familiar with translation or not, this book will make you laugh, ask some questions, and possibly start a petition.” – Collected Books

“an absolute hoot with gravitas” – Heron Books

5-star review in The Telegraph and reviewed in 3:AM

A Book of the Year in The Skinny and Book of the Week at Voce Books and Real Magic Books

French translation from Rag Editions

Taught on the MA in Creative Writing at Brunel University and the course in 'Life Writing, Fragmentary and Experimental Memoir' at the University of Bristol

As formally inventive as readers have come to expect from one of the most daring writers around, and as wild and tricky as its subject matter requires, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode presents us with a series of essays and poems that playfully, artfully propound JEN CALLEJA’S theory of ‘goblinhood’—a theory that takes in all aspects of pop culture from film, literature and art as well as the author’s personal and original examinations of grief, lust, family histories and the physical fact of living in the world as it is. Goblinhood is a perpetually and variously curious, visceral addition to Calleja’s remarkable oeuvre.

Watch the short video adaptation of part of the book here – ‘GOBLINHOOD’

A Book of the Year in Granta, The Big Issue, The Skinny and Lunate Journal

An LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and LRB Bookshop Bestseller

Favourably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and Idler

Selected by Kaliane Bradley, Catherine Lacey, Danielle Dutton and Susan Finlay for Electric Literature, Literary Hub and frieze reading lists

'Top 5 Literary Dystopias' - The Big Issue & a Summer Pick 2023 in World Literature Today and the Faber & Faber blog

Taught at Maynooth University and on the course 'Writing a Literary Novel' at the Granta Writers' Workshop

In a time when looking into the past has become a socially unacceptable and illegal act in the Nation, a group of scholars are offered an attractive residency to allow them to pursue their projects. When the residency transpires to be a devastating trick, these Researchers go on the run, and soon discover that their projects all relate to one major event: the Isletese Disaster – the decline and subsequent devastation fifty years earlier of a long-forgotten roaming archipelago called The Islets.

One figure emerges as central to all of their work: Hester Heller, a reformed cult musiker turned student recruited from the Institute for Transmission as an agent of the state and tasked with gathering reconnaissance on the Disaster by using her old band Vehicle as a cover. Heller is the key to the Researchers’ collective story, which they try to piece together while evading their pursuers. Compiled from the Researchers’ disparate documentation, recollections, and even their imaginations, Vehicle is a timely and daring exploration of xenophobia, exploitation, the writing of histories and legacies, and the politics of translation.

“a debut triumph […] Jen Calleja’s debut novel towers with ambition that proves justified through Vehicle’s meticulous worldbuilding, pin-sharp characterisation and mordant wit.” – Noel Gardner, Buzz Magazine

“Hybrid novels fusing prose and poetry are in vogue: witness the success of Derek Owusu’s prize-winning That Reminds Me, Jen Calleja’s innovative Vehicle and Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, among others.” – The Guardian

First published online by The White Review

Reviewed favourably in The Poetry Review and The Big Issue

Recommended by Sam Sifton in The New York Times

Taught on the MFA in Writing at Columbia University

Dust Sucker is a remarkable new book-length poem by writer and translator Jen Calleja. Clear-eyed, expansive, and intoxicating, this exhilarating work deftly blurs disparate themes including time and mortality, communication and translation, intimacy and infertility.

Presented as a deluxe bilingual bookwork, this ‘contemplation of dust’ explores the pollution of our environment – both at home and in nature – and the shoring of mental detritus. With unquestionable poignancy and flashes of sardonic wit, Calleja excavates her English-Irish-Maltese heritage, inherited anxieties, and ambivalence towards childlessness during climate crisis.

Ultimately, Dust Sucker is triumphant proof that even when feeling dusty with despair, there exists a compulsion to find other means to traverse and communicate experience.

Story 'The Natural' made into a short film adapted/directed by and starring Charlie Rowe (Jay Kelly; Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light; Rocketman)

Favourably reviewed in The Modernist Review and Buzz Magazine

A novelist questions why she’s been shortlisted for the Prize of Prizes Prize; an artist duo has a messy break up; a schoolgirl is saved from a predator by a flash flood and a gang of dead animals; a surgeon has an incurable identity crisis; a budding actor can’t see what’s so funny; a pregnant food writer gets a craving for luxury consumerism.

Reading about busses on detours, short windows opening and closing, erased identities, air kisses, blank books and books yet to be written, I felt held at arm’s length of something crucially important. Deferral and near misses are at the core of Calleja’s writing, yet this collection entirely hits the mark. I loved it.

a witty, sharp, and bold collection of stories that leave you wanting more.

a debut collection of short fiction that’s consistently inventive, envelopingly surreal and biting in its observations.

Ignota Books of the Year List 2020

Goblins explores the beasts we’ve loved, hated, and longed to be. In a searing exploration of her personal obsessions and preoccupations—from disturbing 80s fantasy films and uncanny puppets in modern art, to sexual predators in music scenes and her longing to ‘become a goblin’ like her icons and fellow performers in DIY punk—Jen Calleja shows us the ways she has lived in relation to these base, hungry, selfish and carefree creatures.

A collaboration between Jen Calleja and Rachel Louise Hodgson for ROUGH TRADE EDITIONS x MUSEUM OF WITCHCRAFT AND MAGIC

Shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize 2015

Favourably reviewed in Poetry London, Ambit, and The Poetry School

German translation (ich habe das früher schon einmal getan, tr. Melanie Katz, parasitenpresse 2024)

This is an important debut. Jen Calleja’s Serious Justice is a book of sharp eyed/edged poetic stories, little incisions into a world of music and islands, children, childlessness and decay – a world that is completely hers. It is a book built upon her literary erudition and her punk music, it is both these things at the same time and so it is all the rarer, more beautiful, more consuming. There is real work to be done in poetry now, in the new century, and Serious Justice is doing that work.

While reading through the book writers diverse as Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill and Jack Underwood came to mind […] Calleja also echoes that faint tone of childish curiosity in Plath’s work, which tends to make the unfolding shock of discovery nastier.

Funny, wise, loving, and uncanny, this book seems to be warning us this might really be it, but perhaps, in the end, that’s the kind of Serious Justice we deserve.

LRB Bookshop Summer Pick

Arising from Calleja’s work on the papers of poet and translator Michael Hamburger, this is a joyous and silly pamphlet which plays with the exigencies and discoveries of archival work. The picture of Hamburger recreated from out-of-context snippets and pedantic notes and letter fragments is entirely believable and strangely loveable.

THE SHINING: A VISUAL AND CULTURAL HAUNTING is an immersive, multi-dimensional examination of one of the most infamous films in cinematic history. This loose-leafed and beautifully boxed book—disguised as the ‘writing project’ Jack is typing throughout the course of the film—explores the film’s cultural legacy through exclusive essays, original recollections, contributions from cultural luminaries, and art and visual ephemera.

My essay ‘Maybe it’s Shelley’s world and we’re just living in it?’ features in this publication.

My commissioned story ‘Warszawa’ was published in this anthology of short stories inspired by the album Low by David Bowie.

The anthology features work by Dima Alzayat, Anne Billson, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Jen Calleja, Ruby Cowling, Wendy Erskine, Keeley Forsyth, David Hayden, Zoë McLean, Adam Marek, Preti Taneja, Melissa Wan and Hugo Wilcken.

Best British Short Stories invites you to judge a book by its cover – or, more accurately, by its title. This critically acclaimed series aims to reprint the best short stories published in the previous calendar year by British writers, whether based in the UK or elsewhere. The editor’s brief is wide ranging, covering anthologies, collections, magazines, newspapers and web sites, looking for the best of the bunch to reprint all in one volume.

This new anthology includes stories by Julia Armfield, A.J. Ashworth, Iphgenia Baal, Emma Bolland, Tom Bromley, Gary Budden, Jen Calleja, Robert Dewa, John Foxx, Josephine Galvin, Uschi Gatward, Meave Haughey, Hilaire, Alice Jolly, Isha Karki, Yasmine Lever, Simon Okotie, Mel Pryor, Douglas Thompson and Matthew Turner.

My story ‘Edit History’, which was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize 2020, was published in this anthology.

The poem The Gift features in this anthology.

Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a place where the right words can influence the universe. Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry brings together 30 contemporary voices exploring the territory between the occult and the subversion of patriarchy. Occult poetics is a method of self-determination and transformation through a summoning of the world, through remaking reality. […]