Aftermath: Radical Doubt; Radical Hope

Abstract

Preti Taneja taught creative writing as part of Learning Together, Cambridge University’s prison education programme which took students into high-security prison to learn alongside incarcerated men. One of her first prison students was Usman Khan. Released on licence two years later, he went on to perpetrate the 2019 London Bridge terror attack in which Taneja’s Learning Together colleague Jack Merritt, and Saskia Jones were killed. Aftermath is Taneja’s 2021 award-winning work of abolitionist, lyric non-fiction about the attack: a searching lament on institutional violence and structural harm, Islamophobia, trauma and terror, prison and grief. This article presents two extracts from parts one and three of the book, Radical Doubt and Radical Hope, which were included in Taneja’s 2022 British Academy Lecture at the University of Leeds.