Fernanda Melchor on the Complicities of Fairy Tales and Femicide
From the Thresholds Podcast, Hosted by Jordan Kisner
This is Thresholds, a series of conversations with writers about experiences that completely turned them upside down, disoriented them in their lives, changed them, and changed how and why they wanted to write. Hosted by Jordan Kisner, author of the new essay collection, Thin Places, and brought to you by Lit Hub Radio.
On today’s episode, Jordan talks to Fernanda Melchor about researching and writing her novel Hurricane Season, her decision to leave Veracruz, and the complicity between fairy tale and femicide.
From the interview:
Fernanda Melchor: I kind of feel that my generation is melancholic by nature, because we’ve seen the decline of lots of things, and it is really difficult to have hope in the future. I’m obsessed with that theme. And I’m always writing about people who don’t have a future or feel they don’t have a future, or people who have lost all kind of hope in love.
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Original music by Lora-Faye Åshuvud and art by Kirstin Huber.
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Born in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1982, Fernanda Melchor is widely recognized as one of the most exciting new voices of Mexican literature. Her novel Hurricane Season was a finalist for the 2020 Man Booker International Prize and was long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature. A collection, This Is Not Miami, is forthcoming from New Directions.
