Between Criticism and Fiction: A Conversation with Carlos Fonseca

Cambridge lecturer Carlos Fonseca will be in conversation with Parvathy Salil, to discuss the overlap between his work as a novelist and his work as an academic. Salil and Fonseca will discuss his latest novel, Austral (MacLehose, 2023), as well as his previous two novels Natural History and Colonel Lágrimas. Translated by Megan Mcdowell, Austral is a story that deals with issues concerning memory, extinction and language. Salil and Fonseca will be discussing these themes as well as his work on the Latin American archival novel, testimony, the language of pain and the limits of expression.

Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica in 1987, brought up in Puerto Rico. He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá 39 group (2016), by Granta magazine as one of the twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021) and by Encyclopaedia Britannica as one of the twenty most promising writers in the world for their ‘Young Shapers of the Future’ series (2022). He is the author of three novels: Colonel Lágrimas, Natural History, and Austral, all translated by Megan McDowell. He is also the author of the monograph The Literature of Catastrophe, published by Bloomsbury in 2021. His work has been translated into more than ten languages. He is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge , where he is a fellow of Trinity College. His latest novel, Austral, has been described by The New York Times as a “a masterly voyage of discovery, both physical and intellectual.”