The Vortex

José Eustasio Rivera was born in the municipality of San Mateo, Colombia, on 19 February, 1888, and died on 1 December, 1928 in New York. From a very young age, he experienced the deprivations of rural life, but was able to attend a series of educational establishments while living in poverty, eventually earning a doctorate in law in 1922. He was appointed secretary of the Colombian-Venezuelan Border Commission, as a result of which he embarked on an expedition to the Orinoco-Amazon jungle, where he came face to face with the poverty of the rubber tappers and the barbarism that plagued the territory. This experience was the inspiration for the characters he would go on to describe in The Vortex . On his return to Bogotá, he wrote articles denouncing this and other issues in the press, and in 1924 he published the first edition of his great and only novel. In the meantime, he held political posts that brought him further unpleasant experiences, which did not prevent him from representing Colombia at an international congress in Havana in 1928. From there, he moved to New York with the intention of setting up a publishing house, printing a new edition of The Vortex , and getting it translated into English. That same winter, Rivera fell ill and was admitted to hospital on the verge of a coma. He died suddenly without his illness being diagnosed.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s master’s programme in literary translation. His published and forthcoming translations include Río Muerto by Ricardo Silva Romero (World Editions, 2025) and Toño the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in 2023. His translation of Natalia García Freire’s_This World Does Not Belong to Us_ (Oneworld and World Editions, 2022) was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Inclán.

Daniel Hahn is a writer, editor and translator with over one hundred books to his name. His translations (from Portuguese, Spanish and French) include fiction from Europe, Africa and the Americas and non-fiction by writers ranging from Portuguese Nobel laureate José Saramago to Brazilian footballer Pelé. Recent books include the new Oxford Companion to Children's Literature and translations of Julián Fuks’ Resistance and Occupation . He is a former chair of the Society of Authors and is presently on the board of a number of organisations that deal with literature, literacy, translation and free expression. In 2021 Daniel was made an OBE for his services to literature.