Fair Event, with Jen Calleja - Tuesday 17th June 2025

Join us in the bookshop to hear Jen Calleja in conversation with Camilla Grudova about Fair: The Life-Art of Translation .

6.30pm on Tuesday 17th June at Golden Hare Books, 68 St Stephen Street, EH3 5AQ.

Buy a copy of Fair and receive free entry to the event, or choose our Ticket-Only option for £6 (which can be used towards a purchase of the book at the event). Fair is due to be published on 29th May, so we expect to receive our stock that week. Pre-ordered copies will be sent out/made available for collection as soon as possible.

If you select the Book & Ticket option, you will receive a limited special edition (the edition featured in the graphic) which is available exclusively to independent bookshops in the UK & Ireland for Independent Bookshop Week (14 - 21 June). 

We will send an email to confirm your booking - please be sure to check your junk/spam folder!

About Fair:  Satirical, refreshing and brilliantly playful, this book is 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.

About Jen Calleja: Jen Calleja is a poet, 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 debut novel Vehicle (Prototype, 2023), which was shortlisted for the Short Fiction/University of Essex Prize, and longlisted for the Ivan Juritz Prize for Experimentation in Text. Calleja's short story collection I’m Afraid That’s All We’ve Got Time For was published by Prototype in 2020, and Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode was published by Rough Trade Books in 2024.

About Camilla Grudova: Camilla Grudova is the author of the critically acclaimed debut short story collection, The Doll's Alphabet. Her first novel, Children of Paradise, was longlisted for the Women's Prize. Her most recent book is a second short story collection, The Coiled Serpent, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her work has been published in The White Review, Granta and The Daily Telegraph. In 2023 she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.