Seven Rooms brings together highlights from Hotel, a magazine for new approaches to fiction, non-fiction & poetry which, since its inception in 2016, provided a space for experimental reflection on literature's status as art & cultural mediator. Co-published by Tenement Press and Prototype, this anthology captures, refracts, and reflects a vital moment in independent publishing in the UK, and is built on the shared values of openness, collaboration, and total creative freedom.

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offences at age 20, and sent to high-security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education programme he participated in. On 29 November, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers' Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the bathroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. 'It is the immediate aftermath,' Taneja writes. '"I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh." The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.' In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.

A powerful performance text that illuminates incidents of anti-immigrant violence in contemporary Germany. Between 1998 and 2007 a series of killings in Germany, disdainfully styled "doner murders" by the media, were attributed by German police to internecine rivalries among immigrants. The victims included eight citizens of Turkish origin, a Greek citizen, and a German policewoman. Not until 2011 did the German public learn not only that the police had ignored signs pointing to the real perpetrators, a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Underground, but also that important files, possibly containing evidence implicating state agencies, had disappeared from the archives of Federal Police and intelligence organizations. Esther Dischereit, one of the preeminent German-Jewish voices of the post-Holocaust generation, takes that failure of the state to protect its citizens from racist violence as the core of her performance text Flowers for Otello: On the Crimes That Came Out of Jena. Seeking an appropriate language with which to meet the bereaved, she also finds a way to raise the blanket of silence that is used by those who would prefer that we forget. Combining witness testimony, myth, and incidents from a history of violence against minorities, Flowers for Otello, in Iain Galbraith's translation, refuses chaos, instead revealing the chilling, patterned order of tragedy while bringing a great writer's humanism to the fore.