Additional information
by Cristina Bendek (Author), Robin Myers (Translator)
Five hundred miles from mainland Colombia, grassroots resistance, sloppy vacationers, and a muddy history of conquest converge for Verónica, returning after living in Mexico City, ready to understand herself and the place she came from.
San Andrés rises gently from the Caribbean, part of Colombia but closer to Nicaragua, the largest island in an archipelago claimed by the Spanish, colonized by the Puritans, worked by slaves, and home to Arab traders, migrants from the mainland, and the descendants of everyone who came before.
For Victoria - whose origins on the island go back generations, but whose identity is contested by her accent, her skin colour, her years far away - the sunburnt tourists, sewage blooms, sudden storms, and 'thinking rundowns' where liberation is plotted and dinner served from a giant communal pot, bring her into vivid, intimate contact with the island she thought she knew, her own history, and the possibility for a real future for herself and San Andrés.
Author Biography
Cristina Bendek is a Caribbean author. She was born on the island of San Andrés (Colombia) in October 1987. In 2018 her first novel, Salt Crystals, won the Elisa Mújica National Novel Prize (Colombia). The novel has been translated into Portuguese (Moinhos, 2021), and Danish (Aurora Boreal, 2020), and now appears in English translation for the first time with Charco Press, which is also publishing the novel in Spanish for the North American readership. Cristina is also a journalist and spends her time researching Caribbean literature and writing fiction.
Robin Myers is a poet, translator, essayist, and 2023 NEA Translation Fellow. Recent translations include What Comes Back by Javier Peñalosa M. (Copper Canyon Press); The Brush by Eliana Hernández-Pachón (Archipelago Books); A Whale Is a Country (Fonograf Editions) and In Vitro (Coffee House Press), both by Isabel Zapata; Bariloche by Andrés Neuman (Open Letter Books); and many other works of poetry and prose from across Latin America. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Yale Review, The Drift, Poetry London, and elsewhere; her essays, in Los Angeles Review of Books, Words Without Borders, and Latin American Literature Today .
