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.
Helen Pidd, who interviewed Taneja for the Guardian last year, praised Aftermath and the way the author “blends journalism, memoir, poetry and literary criticism in an attempt to process an event she will never truly understand.”
The genre-blurring book topped a six-strong shortlist, which included Margo Jefferson’s Constructing a Nervous System and Lea Ypi’s Free, to win the prize, which was judged by crime writer Denise Mina, sports writer and columnist Jonathan Liew, broadcaster Stuart Maconie, artist and poet Heather Phillipson and journalist and author Chitra Ramaswamy.
Chair of judges Mina called Aftermath an “extraordinary story of fractured narratives”, while Ramaswamy said Taneja has written “a beautifully crafted and carefully judged examination of an atrocity and the structures and systems that surround it.”
Ramaswamy went on to say that she could not think of a more deserving winner of the Gordon Burn prize, an award that “celebrates the year’s most dazzlingly bold and forward-thinking fiction and non-fiction written in English.”
Aftermath is not Taneja’s first award-winning book. Her 2017 novel We That Are Young, a translation of King Lear set in contemporary India, won both the Desmond Elliott prize and the Eastern Eye award for literature. In addition to writing, Taneja works as a professor of world literature and creative writing at Newcastle University.
In the author’s note at the end of Aftermath, Taneja wrote that her book is about “how a specific act of terrorist violence can shatter, rearrange and refocus us on what we have always known, what we think we know and what we choose to believe”, but also about “personal responsibility”, “generational trauma”, “white savourism” and “radical hope”.
“And finally”, she wrote, it is “about the fluid, shining faith not in a God or in the edicts of any organised religion or institution but in the necessary fiction we rest our contingent lives on, which in English we call trust.”
Previous winners of the Gordon Burn prize – which is run in partnership by the Gordon Burn Trust, New Writing North, Faber & Faber and Durham book festival – include Mina, for her crime novel The Long Drop, and Peter Pomerantsev for This Is Not Propaganda, an investigation into the war against reality. Last year’s winner was Hanif Abdurraqib for his “extraordinary” collection of essays A Little Devil in America. Burn, who died in 2009, was known for nonfiction including Happy Like Murderers, which told the story of Fred and Rosemary West, and the novels Fullalove and Born Yesterday: The News as a Novel.
