Juana Adcock – författare

Through the porosity of the US/Mexico border, Freudian slippages, and toxic relationships, poet Juana Adcock interrogates what it means to cross from one country into another – the gradient spaces that inhabit the nexus between life and death, and the people and languages that sit either side of it.Ghostly glitches, the role of rivers, and the character of Lisa Simpson as voiced for the Latin American market all empower I Sugar the Bones to stand as a polyvocal display; one where revelatory restlessness is underpinned by predicaments and realities which work to complicate the vistas of the interpersonal.

Un Nuevo Sol: British LatinX Writers is the first major anthology of UK-based writers of Latin American heritage, a vibrant, new vanguard in British literature. Representing a community that is the eighth biggest in London, one of the fastest growing and best educated, numbering over 200,000 nationally, the work featured here includes fiction, poetry and theatre that exhibits the stunning fluidity with which the writers inhabit their hybrid heritage. Of the ten writers assembled here, some were born in Latin America and came to the UK in their twenties, others are second generation and have a British parent, but their work shares a fierceness, a playfulness with language and a sly political edge. Playing with form, genre, silence and coding, the resulting work channels and celebrates the rich mythology and scope of Latin American literature, but carries a uniquely British gene - a bit of banter, a flash of restrained cheek. It is no accident that some of the contributors are published and have growing international reputations - for example, Brazilian-British novelist Luiza Sauma (Penguin/Viking) and prize-winning Argentinian-British poet Leo Boix (Chatto). The book also includes an interview with the writer-actress Gael Le Cornec, exploring issues of identity, multiple heritage and displacement.

This ground-breaking bilingual anthology brings together a wide range of contemporary Latin American women poets, all of whom have a wide readership in their own countries but whose work continues to be largely absent from UK bookshops and is thus little known to the majority of English-language poetry readers. The editors, Juana Adcock and Jèssica Pujol Duran, both of them outstanding poets and translators in their own right, have selected the work of 24 female poets (from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela) with the intention of providing a glimpse into the huge amount of diversity in styles, poetics, languages and experiences that exist throughout the continent. The title of the anthology, Temporary Archives, is taken from a line by the Venezuelan poet Gladys Mendía which resonated with the idea of the female body as a site of rebellion and memory, where the scars of the different violences inflicted upon it remain, but are also healed by way of poetry.