Shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize 2020 and 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)
Writer in Residence with index Freiraum, Zurich (Dec 2016-Jan 2017) and recipient of a Cove Park Literature & Translation Residency, Scotland (2021)
Judge for The London Magazine Short Story Prize 2021
Scroll down for information about my published and forthcoming works.
I’m currently working on three new books – Goblinhood: goblin as a mode out with Rough Trade Books October 2023; a new novel with the working title Court of Lore; and Fair: a literary translator memoir (both to be on submission in Summer 2023).
My fiction and poetry have appeared in The White Review, Best British Short Stories 2021 (Salt), The London Magazine, Ambit, 3:AM, Another Gaze, Somesuch Stories, That’s the Colour: 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, PORT, The Architectural Review, Inque, Somesuch Stories, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, History Today, PEN Transmissions, Modern Poetry in Translation, Fabrikzeitung (Zurich), Asymptote, 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 and readings: Southbank Centre, Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Wellcome Collection, Ledbury Poetry Festival.
LRB Bookshop Book of the Week and Bestseller
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. […] Hopefully, you’ll also be captured by this dreamstate-y, complex but brilliantly constructed experimental novel.”
Noel Gardner, Buzz Magazine
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
First published online by The White Review
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
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 […] 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 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. […]
‘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
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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
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