Jen Calleja – författare

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 is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries. It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work.Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is a singularly inventive and illuminating book by one of the UK’s most original and admired writers and translators.

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.

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.

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.

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, tv, 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.