Salt Crystals

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 .

"Colombian writer Bendek’s clear-eyed debut….heralds an intriguing new voice." —Publishers Weekly"A brilliant and sensory overload of a novel." —The Crack Magazine"A vibrant, sensory, and honest debut novel." —Electric Literature