THE WASTE BOOKS

I’m a writer.

I’m currently writing a book for Fitzcarraldo Editions about war, violence, and bureaucracy in South Sudan.

In the last couple of years, I’ve published essays and fiction in n+1, The Baffler, Cabinet, Foreign Policy, and the Guardian, amongst other places.

I write about art, politics, and literature. Recent pieces have examined war and time in South Sudan, the paintings of Jenny Holzer (with whom I have also collaborated), John Berger’s essays, the photography of Peter van Agtmael, and the films of the Dardenne brothers.

In 2020, I won a Five Dials ‘Very Specific Commission’ competition for short fiction and was an artist-in-residence at the Embassy of Foreign Artists in Geneva, where I was doing research in the archives of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for a fictional project (the project is real; it’s a novel).

In 2021, I was a fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and was shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize.

In 2022, my book-in-progress for Fitzcarraldo Editions, The Report: A Report, was awarded a Silvers Foundation grant for forthcoming work.

In 2023, I had a writing residency at Hawthornden Literary Retreat at Hawthornden Castle. I have also had residencies at Art-Omi in upstate New York (2019), and the Dar Al-Ma'mûn, in Marrakech, Morocco (2014); I was a UNESCO Artist Laureate in Creative Writing in 2014.

My Grammar of Redaction, written at the Dar Al-Ma'mûn, and exhibited at the New Museum in New York in 2014, is a long essay on the relationship between language and violence that one finds in redacted documents from the ‘war on terror.’

I was educated at the University of Oxford, l'EHESS-Paris, the University of Amsterdam, and the University of California, Berkeley; I have a Ph.D. in socio-cultural anthropology from the latter institution. I’'ve lived in Britain, Cambodia, Egypt, France, the Netherlands, Kenya, America, Germany, and South Sudan. I’ve taught political philosophy at Sciences-Po Paris, and anthropology at Berkeley and in San Quentin State Prison, California. From 2014-18, I was a Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago, teaching in the Social Science core. From 2021-22, I was a non-resident fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre for Africa, at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

From 2013-19, I was the nonfiction editor of Asymptote, a journal of literature in translation, for which I edited and published authors including Dominique Eddé, Abdourahman A. Waberi, Abdelfattah Kilito, Abdellah Taïa, Antonin Artaud, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Miljenko Jergović, and Semezdin Mehmedinović, amongst many others.

I am also a researcher on South Sudan whose work has been published by Small Arms Survey and the London School of Economics and Political Science, amongst others, and a fellow at Type Investigations, where my investigative journalism, alongside Meg Stalcup, was cited in a Senate Inquiry.

My work as a journalist has been published in the British Guardian, Al Jazeera, BBC Radio 4, the Washington Monthly, and The New Humanitarian, amongst others places.

You can reach me by email at joshuacraze@joshuacraze.com. My public PGP key is here.

You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, and Instagram.