Preti Taneja

Preti Taneja is a British novelist and human rights worker born in 1977. She studied at Cambridge and has worked for the International Justice Mission, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. She teaches creative writing at Newcastle University and was appointed as a prison workshop creative writing teacher, an experience that profoundly influenced her work. We That Are Young (2017, Galley Beggar Press) is her debut novel, a radical rewriting of King Lear set in contemporary India among a hyper-wealthy family whose patriarch is dividing his business empire between his daughters. It won the Desmond Elliott Prize in 2018, the Caledonia Novel Award, and received widespread international acclaim. The novel is dense with the language of Shakespeare and the political reality of modern India. Taneja co-founded the creative writing collective Rife Magazine and has written widely on prison education, race, and literature. Her second book, Aftermath (2021), is a personal essay on the mass casualty attack at Fishmongers' Hall in November 2019, which she survived.