Anima Fatua by Anna Lidia Vega Serova
Winner English PEN Translates Award 2025 In Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova draws on her own experiences of growing up in the late Soviet Union to craft a deeply unsettling coming-of-age novel. In the wake of her parent’s divorce, Alia (the novel’s beguiling protagonist) is forced to negotiated her linguistic, racial and sexual otherness amid the maelstrom of perestroika. Despite the many horrors to which she is exposed, largely at the hands of the novel’s grim menagerie of male characters, Alia exerts her own agency at every turn. More antihero than tragic victim, Alia responds in kind to the cruelty around her. She confounds and enthrals as she leads us on a harrowing journey through a country on the brink. Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby – and has been awarded an English PEN Translates award. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour, which in particular will appeal to readers of Margarita García Robayo, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya or Sayaka Murata, looking to delve back into world of complex, charismatic women.“A journey to the Soviet Union, around, it, and back to Cuba in the 1980s that isfraught with disunion and sorrow, but also joy and desire” -- Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian
“Vega Serova’s fiction reads like a gallery of antiheronies.” -- Mabel Cuesta, Cambridge History of Cuban Literature
“Her writing is seductive. Sometimes it provokes tenderness and sometimes pain. A novel of harsh beauty, it gets under your skin.” -- Karla Suárez, author of Havana Year Zero
Born in the former USSR, to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, Anna Lidia settled definitively in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. Originally a visual artist, in 1997 she won the Premio David for her first short-story collection, Bad Painting. She has become a recognised figure in the Cuban literary scene, with eight short-story collections, three books of poetry and two novels, participating in literary events throughout Europe and the Americas. Through both her words and her painting, her work is noteworthy for its very personal reflection of daily life, grindingly yet magically real, as experienced in present-day Cuba. Many of her short stories have appeared in English, in publications such as American Chordata, Exchanges, Guernica, Two Lines, Words Without Borders and Your Impossible Voice. In 2019, she completed a tour of US universities, speaking about her creative process, as well as about race and gender in Cuba.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781914278808 |
| ISBN 10 | 1914278801 |
| Title | Anima Fatua |
| Author | Anna Lidia Vega Serova |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Amaurea Press |
| Year published | 2025-06-12 |
| Number of pages | 256 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |