Shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize 2020
Longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize 2020
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019
Recipient of an Authors’ Foundation Grant, Society of Authors (2018)
Translator in Residence at the British Library (2017-2019)
Writer in Residence with index Freiraum, Zurich (December 2016 – January 2017)
Judge for The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2021
I’m a writer of short fiction, creative non-fiction and poetry, and take writing and reviewing commissions. I’m editing my first novel, The Islets, and writing a hybrid memoir about literary translation as part of a fully-funded PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at UEA.
My fiction and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Best British Short Stories 2021, That’s the Colour: Short Stories Inspired by Low, Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, On Relationships: An Anthology, The London Magazine, Podium (Vienna), Ambit, 3:AM, Another Gaze, Hotel, Structo, and elsewhere.
My reviews and essays have appeared in many publications including the Times Literary Supplement, PORT, Somesuch Stories, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, The New Statesman, History Today, PEN Transmissions, Huck, Modern Poetry in Translation, Fabrikzeitung (Zurich) and Asymptote. I’ve written long-running columns on literature in translation for the Brixton Review of Books and The Quietus.
I’ve been commissioned for writing, talks and performances by the Wellcome Collection, Tate Modern, the British Library, English PEN, Wapping Project, Grand Union Gallery and Arusha Gallery, and I’ve given readings and been part of discussions at the Southbank Centre, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Foyles Charing Cross, and elsewhere.
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
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.
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
Goblins uses the idea of a gruesome magical creature as a springboard for a series of short essays investigating the author’s childhood passion for the uncanny… and her complicated adult relationship with fully embodying the role of a powerful performer in a punk band. The result is a sharp blend of art criticism, feminist commentary on the live music scene, and memoir, which uses goblinry as a binding theme throughout.
Caitlín Doherty, The Stinging Fly
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
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
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
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. […]
‘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.
Co-written with Sophie Collins
Read Here
As recommended in the Granta ‘Discoveries’ newsletter.
Drawing by Richard Phoenix from The Translator is Present – Saskia Vogel Interviewed.
Co-written with Heather Perkins, Liv Willars
Read Here