Author and academic Preti Taneja has won the 2022 Gordon Burn prize for her “unflinching work of narrative non-fiction”, Aftermath.
The winning title is about the London Bridge stabbing in 2019, when 28-year-old terrorist Usman Khan attacked five people, two fatally. Taneja realised shortly afterwards that she had known Khan – he had been a student in a creative writing class she had taught two years earlier in HMP Whitemoor, where he was incarcerated at the time. In fact, the event at Fishmongers’ Hall during which the stabbing took place was a celebration of the very prison education programme Taneja had worked for – and an event she been invited to, but did not attend. One of the murder victims, 25-year-old Jack Merritt, had been her colleague.
