Writing

Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019

Recipient of an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors 2018

Shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize 2015

My debut short fiction collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For (2020) is published by Prototype.

Serious Justice (2016), my first poetry collection, was published by Test Centre and was shortlisted for the LRB Bookshop’s Best Debut. Hamburger in the Archive (If a Leaf Falls, 2019), a pamphlet of found poems, was a LRB Bookshop Summer Pick.

My writing has appeared in many publications including Ambit, Times Literary Supplement, 3:AM, History Today, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Another Gaze, Somesuch Stories, Vice, Structo, Hotel, Funhouse, and in the anthologies Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota, 2018), and On Relationships (3 of Cups, 2020). I’ve also been commissioned by English PEN, Hotel, Les Fugitives, The Enemies Project, and the Wapping Project.

I’ve written columns on literature in translation for the Brixton Review of Books and The Quietus.

Featured Writing

I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For

Prototype, 2020

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.

Calleja creates worlds where ‘there is so much space between molecules that we never really touch anyone or anything.’ 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.

Isabel Waidner, Author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff
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Comic, inventive and surreal, I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For renders a world unfamiliar yet familiar with each bright shard of a story.

Sophie Mackintosh, Author of The Water Cure

Calleja’s writing combines wit, guile and style – social intricacies and powerplay are explored and exploded in this formidable collection.

Eley Williams, Author of Attrib.

Serious Justice

Test Centre, 2016

Shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize 2015

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.

SJ Fowler

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.

Ambit

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.

Jack Underwood
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Urgent, contemporary and challenging […] This debut marks her out as a talent to watch

Edward Doegar, Poetry London

A haunting book, documenting the anxiety and isolation of everyday life through elegant, disarmingly intimate poems

Sophie Robinson, The Poetry School

Hamburger In The Archive

If A Leaf Falls Press, 2019

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.

John Clegg, London Review Bookshop

Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry

Edited by Sarah Shin, Rebecca Tamás
Ingota Books, 2018

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. […]

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On Relationships: An Anthology

Edited by Clare Bogen
3 of Cups, 2020

‘Miracle’, a personal essay on translation from part of a work in progress, features in this anthology.

Relationships are important. Whether they are with others or ourselves, they shape us, they move us, they empower us and they break our hearts. On Relationships is the third anthology from 3 of Cups.

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Selected Writing