Alia Trabucco Zerán

Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Santiago de Chile in 1983. She is a fiction and non-fiction writer. After studying law in Santiago de Chile, she completed a Spanish-language creative writing degree at New York University on a Fulbright scholarship and went on to complete a doctorate in Latin American Studies at University College London. Zerán has worked as a lawyer and author on human rights issues and was awarded the Anna Seghers Prize in 2022.

In her debut novel »La Resta« (2015; Eng. »The Remainder«, 2024), three children of former left-wing resistance fighters are confronted with the past of the Pinochet dictatorship. Felipe, whose parents disappeared under the regime, sees corpses everywhere in Santiago de Chile, which he obsessively counts. Iquela and her childhood friend Paloma, who grew up in exile in Berlin, are also searching for their place in a torn society. In deeply evocative language, the novel tells of the difficulty of remembering and forgetting and the distortions of a dictatorship that reaches right into people’s hearts.

In her second publication, the narrative non-fiction book »Las Homocidas« (2019; Eng. »When Women Kill«, 2022), Trabucco Zerán subjects the biographies of four Chilean women who became murderesses to a critical in-depth analysis. She sheds light on the social and psychological background from a decidedly feminist perspective and comments on her research in parallel, in a kind of diary.

In her latest novel »Limpia« (2021; Eng. »Clean«, 2024), Trabucco Zerán focuses on the precarious working world of mostly female domestic workers: after the death of her employers’ daughter, domestic worker Estela is questioned. Her testimony develops into a dizzying and psychologically complex close-up of unbridgeable class differences. »It is the matter-of-fact, hard-boiled, almost emotionless reporting tone that gives this book its power«. (»Neues Deutschland«)

Alia Trabucco Zerán lives in Santiago, Chile.

Status: May 2024

The Remainder
And Other Stories
Sheffield, 2018
(Tr: Sophie Hughes)

Clean
Fourth Estate
London, 2024
(Tr: Sophie Hughes)