Karla Suárez

Karla Suárez is a Cuban writer, born in Havana in 1969. She studied classical guitar and has a degree in electronic engineering. Suárez is the author of three collections of short stories, two books that combine travel writing with photography, and four novels. Her books have received many international awards, including the Lengua de Trapo Prize for her 1999 debut novel Silencios (Silences), for which she was also selected among the ten novelists of the year in 2000 by the newspaper El Mundo. The French translation of Silencios was also a finalist for the Insular America Award and Guyana Prize for Literature 2004. Many of her stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines published in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Several of her stories as well as some of her novels have been adapted for television and theatre. In 2007, she was selected by the Hay Festival as one of the Bogotá39 writers, which groups together the best Latin American authors under the age of 40. Havana Year Zero (2011) is her third novel and has obtained the Prix Carbet of the Caribbean and Tout-Monde and the Insular Book Prize, both in France. It is her first book to be published in English.

Christina MacSweeney received the 2016 Valle Inclán prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, and her translation of Daniel Saldaña París’ Among Strange Victims was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Other authors she has translated include: Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set; Palabras migrantes/ Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song; The House of the Pain of Others).