Havana Year Zero

Karla Suárez Karla Suárez was born in Havana in 1969. Since her childhood, she has been passionate about mathematics, writing stories, and music. She studied classical guitar and has a degree in electronic engineering, a profession she continues to develop. Suárez is the author of five collections of short stories and four novels. Her novels received many awards, such as the Lengua de Trapo Prize for her 1999 debut novel Silencios (Silences ); and the Prix Carbet of the Caribbean and Tout-Monde and the Insular Book Prize, both in France, in 2012. Many of her stories have appeared in anthologies and magazines published in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Several of her stories have been adapted for television and theatre. Suárez has received several creative grants, including the one awarded by the National Book Center of France (CNL). In 2007, she was selected by the Hay Festival and Bogota World Book Capital, as one of 39 representative young writers of Latin America. She lives in Lisbon, where she coordinates the Reading Club of the Cervantes Institute and works as a writing teacher at the Writers’ School in Madrid. 

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 ).