From Savagery
Electric, defiant, and singing with melancholia, Alejandra Banca's devastating debut throws its arms around a displaced generation of young Venezuelan migrants, reveling in the clamor and beauty of their day-by-day survival.
Below the rooftops of Barcelona's historic avenues, in the shadow of the Sagrada Família and its fleet of construction cranes, thrums a vital pulse: meal-delivery bikers, sex workers, strung out artists, anti-capitalist squatters, undocumented shopgirls, fledgeling drug dealers, and a thousand more lives that cross and knit together at the lowest level of Spain's urban tumult. The young expats of these stories careen through crowded streets, night clubs, and dating apps with a devil-may-care abandon that belies their precarious circumstances. Tragedy will erupt and then ebb in an instant, receding in the rearview like a roadside collision and haunting those that push on. Running on fumes and paltry tips, Banca's beleaguered characters race along a knife's edge and find unexpected solace in moments of shared vulnerability; a knowing thread that unites these strangers in a strange land.
In this English PEN Award-winning translation by Katie Brown, From Savagery announces Alejandra Banca as a resplendent and masterful new voice in Latin American literature—one that will take readers by storm.
Alejandra Banca was born in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1994. She earned a B.A. from Andrés Bello Catholic University in 2016. She made her debut in 2021 with two poems in UBICUO, published by Lecturas de Arraigo. Her poems were published in the third edition of Anthropología de fuego (2022) and she received a digital publication mention in the Venezuelan poetry contest Ecos de la Luz, both from Ediciones Palíndromus. From Savagery is her first short story collection.
Katie Brown teaches contemporary Spanish and Latin American culture at the University of Exeter and holds a Ph.D. in Venezuelan literature under the Bolivarian Revolution from King's College London (2016). She is co-editor of Crude Words, an anthology of Venezuelan texts in English, for which she also translated six stories. She is part of the women’s U.K., U.S., and Venezuelan translation collective, Colaboratorio Ávila. Her translations frequently appear in Latin American Literature Today.
