“Londoño’s prose is violent and exquisite, a brutal and sophisticated poetry. It shocks the reading body: it vibrates with vitality. It beats with our blood, Latin American blood. Great-granddaughter of Rulfo, I am sure, she will be the forerunner of multitudes. This is literature.”

“The maturity in the writing and the literary quality of her chronicle made Vanessa Londoño shine among the rest of the finalists for this edition of the Nuevas Plumas Award. Londoño is a great observer of detail and an efficient composer of the greater theme that is illuminated through those details. To add to those talents, her interest in politics, gender, and cultural diversity make her, in my opinion, this year’s great discovery in journalism and in Spanish-language literature.”

“Her descriptions of the body, her use of setting as another character, her careful and sharp language, all combined with a very sui generis voice, made this project stand out immediately among several finalists. With a visceral impact, she writes about violence without falling into the commonplace, and she proposes a critical and complex position before the totalizing idea of “the Latin American.”

“People in Colombia have coexisted with violence for several decades, a violence that clings to the body: social ones, individual ones, and, above all, ones belonging to women. How can this be developed without falling back on statistics or the stereotypical? With constrained, colloquial, and cultured language, Vanessa Londoño achieves a precise narrative metaphor that resuscitates the ghosts of the mutilated bodies through writing.”

“What an incredible writer! (...) How do we narrate violence, the subjugation of bodies, the deafening war against the dispossessed? How do we narrate the misery of the powerful? How do we, once again, narrate so much blood shed in Latin America? Vanessa Londoño does this exquisitely and lyrically with colloquial language that has been transformed into poetics. El asedio animal is a successor to Rulfo and Asturias. The words have their own particular and enchanting music that invites us to read them out loud.”

“Here, Londoño proves that she has a very powerful and personal voice that doesn’t try to imitate anyone. She knows what she wants to say and the precise way to say it. It isn’t easy to turn horror into poetry, and Vanessa Londoño does it with exciting brilliance.”

“In El asedio animal, the human being has forever exhausted his possibility of interpreting the cosmos. More than people, we are pigs, but not in the sense in which tradition usually treats this animal, but in a much more subtle way, because that is how Londoño’s intelligent gaze works: the only animal that, because the vertebrae of its spine are welded to its skull, cannot look at the sky. And from this brutal disadvantage, Londoño gives voice to victims and perpetrators, in a beautifully woven fabric that hurts to look at, although one cannot help but do so.”

“With meticulous prose, full of poetry, Vanessa Londoño constructs in El asedio animal a powerful first novel, where nature assumes the role of the main character and through which the paths of those who could be some of the tens of thousands of victims of more than half a century of armed conflict in Colombia are narrated. ”

“With her novel, Vanessa Londoño conjures horror and beauty to read and look again (through the images that draw the stroke of words) at what we should not forget. That the history of violence, the history of Colombia, the history of South America and the history of those who suffered it in their bodies, still endures.”