Elizabeth Chakrabarty: Lessons in Love and Other Crimes

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.

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 was longlisted for  the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022 and shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2022. She was also shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction 2022. She lives in London.