039 Jen Calleja: Vehicle

In this episode, we speak to author, translator and musician Jen Calleja about her inventive novel, Vehicle. We discuss what it means to write a verse novel and the politics of translation. We discuss the use of archive and the ways in which experimental writing can meet transformative politics and possibilities. We speak about bringing the energy and ethos of DIY punk to the novel and the literary world more generally, through the importance of radical independent publishing and the role of collective writing, as well as the dangers of censorship within the arts.

Jen Calleja is a poet, short story writer and essayist who has been widely published, including in The White Review, The London Magazine, and Best British Short Stories (Salt). She was awarded an Authors’ Foundation Grant from the Society of Authors to work on Vehicle, and was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize for an excerpt from the novel. She was also longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text. Prototype published her short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For in 2020.

She has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize and the Schlegel-Tieck Prize as a literary translator from German into English and was the inaugural Translator in Residence at the British Library.

Calleja played and toured in the DIY punk bands Sauna Youth, Feature, Monotony, Gold Foil and Mind Jail spanning a period of over a decade as both a drummer and a vocalist.

She is also a publisher at Praspar Press.

References

Vehicle by Jen Calleja

I'm Afraid That's All We've Got Time For by Jen Calleja

GOBLINS by Jen Calleja and Rachel Louise Hodgson

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine

The Marlowe Papers by Ros Barber

Visit Storysmith for 10% discount on Jen's work.