About Lessons in Love and Other Crimes

Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2022 and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022

Tesya has reasons to feel hopeful after leaving her last job, where she was subjected to a series of anonymous hate crimes. Now she is back home in London to start a new lecturing position, and has begun an exciting, if tumultuous, love affair with the enigmatic Holly. But this idyllic new start quickly sours.

Tesya finds herself victimized again at work by an unknown assailant, who subjects her to an insidious, sustained race hate crime. As her paranoia mounts, Tesya finds herself yearning for the most elemental desires: love, acceptance, and sanctuary. Her assailant, meanwhile, is recording his manifesto, and plotting his next steps.

Inspired by the author’s personal experiences of hate crime and bookended with essays which contextualise the story within a lifetime of microaggressions, Lessons in Love and Other Crimes is a heart-breaking, hopeful, and compulsively readable novel about the most quotidian of crimes.

About The Indigo Press

The Indigo Press is an independent publisher of contemporary fiction and non-fiction, based in London. Guided by a spirit of internationalism, feminism and social justice, we publish books to make readers see the world afresh, question their behaviour and beliefs, and imagine a better future.

About the Speaker

Elizabeth Chakrabarty is an interdisciplinary writer who uses creative and critical writing, besides performance, to explore themes of race, gender and sexuality. Her debut novel Lessons in Love and Other Crimes, inspired by experience of race hate crime, was published in 2021 by The Indigo Press, along with her essay ‘On Closure and Crime’. In the USA Lessons in Love and Other Crimes was selected as a Top-Shelf title for promotion in the Trafalgar Square/ IPG Fall 2021 campaign to retailers and libraries. In 2022 Elizabeth was longlisted for both the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Polari First Book Prize, for Lessons in Love and Other Crimes. She was also shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction 2022, and her story ‘That Last Summer’ was published in The Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction 2022: Crime Stories by Comma Press. She was shortlisted for the Asian Writer Short Story Prize in 2016, and her story ‘Eurovision’ was published in Dividing Lines (Dahlia, 2017). Her poetry has been published by Visual Verse, and her short creative-critical work includes writing published in Gal-Dem, New Writing Dundee, Wasafiri, and the anthology Imagined Spaces (Saraband, 2020), and in translation, by Glänta and Deus Ex Machina. She received an Authors’ Foundation Grant from The Society of Authors (UK) in December 2018, to support the writing of Lessons in Love and Other Crimes, and she was chosen as one of the runners up for the inaugural CrimeFest bursary for crime fiction authors of colour in 2022. She lives in London.

Host or Publisher UCL Institute of Advanced Studies