Elizabeth Chakrabarty

Dr Elizabeth Chakrabarty is an interdisciplinary writer exploring the themes of racism and sexuality, and her debut literary crime novel, Lessons in Love and Other Crimes, was published in 2021 by the Indigo Press, along with her essay, On Closure and Crime. Inspired by experience of race hate crime, Lessons in Love and Other Crimes is also a queer love story. It was long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize, and also shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize in 2022. In 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.

Her story ‘That last Summer’ was shortlisted for The Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction, and published in the 2022: Crime Stories Anthology (Comma Press, 2022), and another shortlisted story, ‘Eurovision’ was published in the Asian Writer Short Story Prize anthology, Dividing Lines (Dahlia Press, 2017). Other shorter creative-critical work has been published in diverse publications, and most recently includes writing published by Gal-Dem and Wasafiri, and in the anthology Imagined Spaces (Saraband, 2020).

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. In 2023 she was invited to Belgium, as Writer in Residence at Passa Porta in Brussels.

Other Awards

Longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize 2022, for Lessons in Love and Other Crimes.

Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2022 for Lessons in Love and Other Crimes.

Shortlisted for the Dinesh Allirajah Prize for Short Fiction: Crime Stories 2022, for her story ‘That last Summer’. Shortlisted for the Asian Writer Short Story Prize 2016, for her story ‘Eurovision’.