Literature written by women is present. A generation of women writers has decided not to take a step back and raise their voices for those who, for years, were not valued or studied in depth because the literary canon focused on men.
Voices that navigate between horror, violence, the unusual and fantasy are stomping in the world of letters. Here we leave you three writers who seek to transform reality and give voice to vulnerable people, and whom you can meet to celebrate this International Book Day.
Lola Ancira, the new pen of surreal horror
The Queretaro storyteller Lola Ancira, who has focused her work on the fantastic and horror, is a revelation of recent years. His lyrics are steeped in references to his favorite writers, such as Jorge Luis Borges, Horacio Quiroga and the master of the horror tale, Edgar Allan Poe, but they are also nourished by Latin American storytellers such as Mariana Enríquez, Samantha Schweblin and Mónica Ojeda.
His first book of short stories, entitled Tusitala of deaths (reissue of Fondo Blanco), shows a dream world in which fear and horror are not always supernatural, but emanate from within. Ancira mixes pieces of reality with the fantastic, resulting in pieces such as The Misfortunes of Vigilius Haufniensis, a text with a touch of Gore or Fictional Atavism, a narrative that makes the reader enter a spiral of madness.
His second book of short stories, The Waltz of the Monsters (White Background), is a photograph of the terror caused by the human species: disappeared, dead children and animals in disgrace are some of the common threads that Ancira uses to bring to the world of the macabre.
With Sad shadows (Paradise Lost), her most recent book, the young writer gives a twist to her own pen, approaches the chronicle and explores madness and the criminal mind, where the scenarios are Lecumberri and La Castañeda.
But Ancira’s pen doesn’t stop there. Office of the Deceased and Territory of witches they are a tribute to female strength and how it should interact in a male-dominated world.
María Fernanda Ampuero, the fierce activist
The Ecuadorian writer focuses her stories on violence, that which emanates from the family nucleus and detonates a spiral from which no one is spared, especially women. Their stories are inspired by the gender violence that plagues Latin America every day.
Ampuero defines herself as a feminist and activist. He writes with a brutality that he defines as necessary. His stories are focused on the pain he suffered during his childhood, product of living with a macho father who treated his mother badly; however, she claims that this environment made her stronger and more independent.
The writer began her career as a journalist. In fact, his first published book was What I learned in hairdressing, a compilation of articles and chronicles he wrote for the magazine Fuchsia. Ampuero dedicated his journalistic texts to the phenomenon of migration, so his next publication was Residence permit, published in 2013 by the publishing house La Caracola, a series of chronicles on migration in Spain.
It was not until 2018 when Ampuero decided to cross the journalistic border and threw himself into the ring with his first book of short stories, entitled Cockfight, of the publishing house Páginas de Espuma. In it, he poses scenarios full of explicit violence where family sexual violence is the protagonist.
With Human sacrifices, published in 2021, also in Páginas de Espuma, endorses her voice as an activist and defender of the weakest. In these stories, the victims are children, old women and everything that society considers “sacrificial”.
Ampuero uses his experience as a journalist who has covered the migratory phenomenon and fuses it with fiction, so that the message he wants to give is clear: a cry that tries to awaken the indifferent.
Iliana Vargas, the narrator of the unusual
The storyteller Iliana Vargas, originally from Mexico City, has become a reference when talking about the new science fiction narrative. His stories are characterized by black humor and boldness with which he mixes science fiction with fantastic characters such as witches or vampires.
His first book of short stories was Joni Munn and other psychosome disorders; later published Tape recorder, a complicated of 25 stories focused on parallel realities with characters that seem everyday, but that move in different planes or have characteristics that make them fantastic. In this book, Vargas created his own universe and rebelled against the rules of the genre.
In I’m not going to save you, from Eolas Ediciones, his most recent work, opts to divide it into three parts: ether bodies, bodies on land and transfigured, where from the fantastic and science fiction he addresses situations where his characters, mostly female, face situations that take them to the limit, either physically or emotionally.
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