Fernanda Trías
Fernanda Trías (Uruguay, 1976) is the author of novels La Azotea (The Rooftop), La ciudad invencible (The Invincible City), and Mugre rosa (Pink Slime), as well as the short story collection No soñarás flores and the chapbook El regreso. Her work has also been included in anthologies in Germany, Colombia, Peru, Spain, Uruguay, the US, and the UK, including 20/40 and Palabras Errantes. Her work has been translated into German, French, Hebrew, English, and Italian so far. La azotea was selected as one of the best books of the year by El País Cultural and was awarded the National Uruguayan Literature Prize. In 2006, she received the BankBoston Foundation Prize for National Culture. She was a friend and student of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero and participated in the creation of De los flexes terpines, a collection directed by Levrero that published fifteen titles, almost all by new writers. In the fifth volume of that collection, Trías published her first novella, Cuaderno para solo un ojo.
In 2004, she won the Unesco-Aschberg scholarship for writers and went to France, where she lived for five years. In 2010, She moved to Buenos Aires, where she worked as a translator, reader, and copyeditor for multiple publishing houses. In 2012, she won a scholarship to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at New York University. In 2017, she won the first SEGIB-Eñe-Casa de Velázquez Prize and residency in Madrid for her project Mugre rosa. She lives in Bogotá, Colombia, where she has taught at the Universidad Nacional’s Creative Writing MFA. In 2019, she was selected for the “Writer-in-Residence” program at the Universidad de los Andes, where she currently lives and writes.
“Fernanda Trías is a sort of well-known secret. (…) She is intense, truthful, concise, visual.”
“At odds with the sterile literature that is currently trendy, Fernanda Trías is one of the most interesting contemporary narrators of Spanish-language literature.”
“Therein lies her skill: she narrates what seems to be impossible to narrate. The seeds of pain, the trembling feat that is the attachment to life.”
“Trías submerges her characters in a dark well, replaces borders all the time, processes an emotional narrative that is uncommon in our literature—with the prestigious precedent of Armonía Somers’s disturbing writing—through the tension and intensity of her poetics of pain that are linked to the body, sex, and fear in all of its expressions, where language is no less dramatic than life itself.”
“Fernanda Trías cuts her phrases with a scalpel, lightly reclining the page onto the words to get to the very marrow of language.”
“The drama in Trías’s characters is also the drama of a language that, with the cadence of a style that found its voice from the very first book, expresses the agonizing side of those confined to the abyss of their own interiority.”
BY FERNANDA TRÍAS:
Mugre rosa
NOVEL, 2020
La azotea
NOVEL, 2018
No soñarás flores
STORIES, 2016
La ciudad invencible
NOVEL, 2013