SAUdaDES

Sandra Lorenzano

Saudades is a tale of shards in which the daily spoils of history, so to speak, are forever absent: exile, banishment, disappearance, wreckage, death. A choral novel of alternating voices that tries to say what cannot be said, catching stories that will remain foreign, officiating over a sorrow that is and is not our own in a murmur of absences where the erotic body offers fleeting refuge while literary references (yet another body, yet another voice) provide stings that accentuate the absence, yet keep the flame alive. –Silvia Molloy

In Saudades, her first novel, Lorenzano reconstructs the voice of a clearly female subject trying to rediscover herself in a world of absence and exile; by that I mean one that emerges among the lost voices of a distant or recent past. In their midst, the narrator navigates across the belly of her lover and companion from time to time, or traces the silhouette of a missing person. She also interprets the longing gaze of a mother who searches for her daughter and desperately tries to recover a mother tongue that has suddenly become foreign. –Oswaldo Estrada

Sandra Lorenzano is an “Argen-Mex” writer (born in 1960 in Argentina and exiled to Mexico, where she has lived since 1976.) An honorific member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte, she is the author of the novels Fuga en mí menor, La estirpe del silencio and El día que no fue, as well as various collections of poetry and essays. She was awarded the XV Premio Málaga in 2024 for her book of essays Herida fecunda and the Premio Nacional de Poesía Clemencia Isaura in 2023 for her book of poetry Abismos, quise decir. She holds a PhD in Literature from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and is a full professor at the same university. She is currently Director of the Centro de Estudios Mexicanos UNAM-América Latina.