Author of Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode, Vehicle, Dust Sucker, I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For, Hamburger in the Archive and Serious Justice
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 for my translation of Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands
Recipient of an Authors’ Foundation Grant (Society of Authors, 2018) and a Cove Park Literature & Translation Residency (2021). Writer in Residence with index Freiraum, Zurich (Dec 2016-Jan 2017) and Translator in Residence at the British Library (2017-2019)
Judge for The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2021, the Goldsmiths Young Writer Competition 2025, the Hastings Book Festival Poetry Competition 2025 and the Scratch Books Short Story Competition 2024
My latest book is Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode (Rough Trade Books, October 2024), and my next book will be my literary translator memoir Fair: The Life-Art of Translation (Prototype, 29 May 2025). Scroll down for information about my published books.
My fiction, poetry and life writing have appeared in The White Review,Best British Short Stories 2021 (Salt), The London Magazine, Ambit, Wasafiri, Another Gaze, Somesuch Stories, 3:AM, Waiting for the Gift: Short Stories Inspired by Low (Confingo), Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry (Ignota), Altered States (Ignota), On Relationships: An Anthology (3 of Cups), Hotel,Structo, Podium (Vienna), manuskripte (Graz), and elsewhere.
My reviews and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, ArtReview, History Today, PORT, The Architectural Review, Inque, Somesuch Stories,The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, PEN Transmissions, Fabrikzeitung (Zurich),and elsewhere. I’ve written long-running columns on literature in translation for the Brixton Review of Books and The Quietus.
Commissions: Tate Modern, English PEN, Wapping Project, Grand Union Gallery, Arusha Gallery. Talks, readings & panels: Southbank Centre, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Granta Writers’ Workshop, London Book Fair, Wellcome Collection, Museum of London, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Deutsches Haus NYU, Boston University, EUNIC Literature Days Festival (Vienna). Chairing: Cheltenham Literature Festival, British Library, London Book Fair, LRB Bookshop.
Featured Writing
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation
Prototype
Longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text 2020 (excerpt)
Favourably reviewed in The Observer
Excerpted in Wasafiri and Inque
*BOOK TOUR!*
Spring ’25
23 May — Translated By Festival, Bristol w/ Polly Barton
4 June — Brighton Festival, Brighton w/ Kate Briggs
5 June — Pages of Hackney, London w/ Jack Young
11 June — October Books, Southampton w/ Toby Litt
12 June — Book Hive, Norwich (Fair/Goblinhood double launch) w/ Philippa Snow
16 June — Mount Florida Books, Glasgow
17 June — Golden Hare, Edinburgh w/ Camilla Grudova 18 June — 1b Books x Opt Indie Books, Newcastle upon Tyne
19 June — Fitzcarraldo Editions Summer Party, London (launch of my translation of The City and the World)
24 June — Five Leaves Bookshop, Nottingham w/ Olivia Hellewell
26 June — Margate Bookshop x Fort Road Hotel, Margate
9 July – Stammtisch Fair reading group (closed online event), Goethe-Institut Glasgow
Summer ’25
15 August – Edinburgh International Book Festival (lunchtime and evening events – see programme for full details)
Autumn ’25
Birmingham, Durham, Stockport, further London events and more TBC. For Goblinhood event dates, see below.
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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.
“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
It is no mean feat to build a fair as inventive, as informative, as inclusive to everyone along the translation experience spectrum, and yes, I’ll say it, as goddamn FUN as this one, but Jen Calleja has gone and done it.
Polly Barton
Its invigorating candour and vivid quiddity feels audacious, polemical, essential.
Anthony Cummins,
The Observer
Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode
Rough Trade Books, 2024
Second printing! Over 1500 copies sold
5-star review in The Telegraph
A Book of the Year in The Skinny and Book of the Week at Voce Books and Real Magic Books
Recommended in the Hero Magazine Christmas Reading List & LRB Bookshop Christmas Gift Guide
French translation forthcoming from Rag Editions/ABC Librarioli (2026)
*BOOK TOUR*
2024
Thu 10 Oct — The Hastings Bookshop, Hastings
Thu 17 Oct — Voce Books, Birmingham
Fri 18 Oct — Rare Mags, Stockport Wed 23 Oct — bookhaus, Bristol Mon 28 Oct — The Social, London Launch Party
Tue 29 Oct — Caper, Oxford
Wed 13 Nov — The Library at Deptford Lounge
Thu 14 Nov — Margate Bookshop x Fort Road Hotel, Margate 2025
Wed 2 April — Novel Books, Sheffield
Thu 3 April — Dead Ink Books, Liverpool
Wed 16 April — Bard Books, London
Sun 4 May — Neo-Ancients x Weird Walk, Stroud
Sat 31 May — Real Magic Books, Wendover
Thu 12 June — Book Hive, Norwich
*Well Read Bookshop, Lisbon, Portugal TBA*
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.
something akin to Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint or Katharina Volckmer’s The Appointment: a virtuoso exercise in free-association
Oscar Mardell,
3:AM magazine
Follow Jen Calleja down whatever path she leads you: she’s a sage and enchanting guide.
Kate Simpson, The Telegraph
Vehicle: a verse novel
Prototype, 2023
Third printing! Over 2000 copies sold
Favourably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and Idler
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
Excerpted in The Literary Hub and 3:AM
A Summer Pick 2023 in World Literature Today and the Faber & Faber blog
Selected by Kaliane Bradley, Danielle Dutton and Susan Finlay for Electric Literature, Literary Hub and frieze reading lists
10-date UK and Germany tour
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 RemindsMe, Jen Calleja’s innovative Vehicle and Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, among others.” – The Guardian
a work stuffed to bursting with creative energy […] if Vehicle is as much an ego document as it is a fiction, it makes for a convincingly disordered and provisional self-portrait
Hal Jensen,
Times Literary Supplement
To say that Vehicle is a feminist Pale Fire for the Brexit generation may not be high enough praise for this intoxicating, thrilling and endlessly inventive work.
Joanna Walsh
Dust Sucker
Bilingual edition! Includes a German translation by Carolina Schutti.
Makina Books, 2023
Second printing! Over 400 copies sold...
First published online by The White Review
Reviewed favourably in The Poetry Review and The Big Issue
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.
In this beautiful book, Jen Calleja conjures desire and loss, depth and wistfulness, through her signature hypnotic melodies. We see her plucked blackberries, her antique photos, her infant gulls, and we recognise the pained loss of “sunset/on the toilet paper”. Longings dwell here, as wondrous and abundant as dust.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A Ghost in the Throat
I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For
Prototype, 2020
Story 'The Natural' adapted into a short film made by and starring Charlie Rowe (Rocketman, Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light)
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.
Isabel Waidner,
Author of We Are Made of Diamond Stuff
a witty, sharp, and bold collection of stories that leave you wanting more.
The Modernist Review
a debut collection of short fiction that’s consistently inventive, envelopingly surreal and biting in its observations.
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.
Goblins
With art by Rachel Louise Hodgson
Rough Trade Books, 2020
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 […] 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
Serious Justice
Test Centre, 2016
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.
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.
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
The Shining: a visual and cultural haunting
Created by Craig Oldham
Rough Trade Books, 2022
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.
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.