Nonfiction by Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. Sophie Hughes
April 5, 2022 • 5 x 7.75 • 256 pages • 978-1-56689-633-7
A genre-bending feminist account of the lives and crimes of four women who committed the double transgression of murder, violating not only criminal law but also the invisible laws of gender.
When Women Kill: Four Crimes Retold analyzes four homicides carried out by Chilean women over the course of the twentieth century. Drawing on her training as a lawyer, Alia Trabucco Zerán offers a nuanced close reading of their lives and crimes, foregoing sensationalism in order to dissect how all four were both perpetrators of violent acts and victims of another, more insidious kind of violence. This radical retelling challenges the archetype of the woman murderer and reveals another narrative, one as disturbing and provocative as the transgressions themselves: What makes women lash out against the restraints of gendered domesticity, and how do we—readers, viewers, the media, the art world, the political establishment—treat them when they do?
Expertly intertwining true crime, critical essay, and research diary, International Booker Prize finalist Alia Trabucco Zerán (The Remainder), in a translation by Sophie Hughes, brings an overdue feminist perspective to the study of deviant women.
About the Author
Alia Trabucco Zerán was born in Chile in 1983. She was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for a master’s in creative writing in Spanish at New York University, where she wrote her debut novel La resta (The Remainder). La resta won the prize for Best Unpublished Literary Work awarded by the Consejo Nacional del Libro de Chile, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker International in 2019. It has been translated into seven languages. Las homicidas is her second book. She lives between Santiago and London.
About the Translator
Sophie Hughes is a British translator of Spanish-language writers such as Alia Trabucco Zerán, Fernanda Melchor, and Enrique Vila-Matas. She has been nominated three times for the International Booker Prize, as well as for the Dublin Literary Award, the Valle Inclán Translation Prize, the National Book Award in Translation, the PEN Translation Prize, the National Translation Award in Prose, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.
Praise for When Women Kill
