Her first novel, ‘Mapocho,’ is published in Spain for the first time. A story about the painful recent history of her country.

The writer, actress, and screenwriter, is 49 years old.  The same age since the period of hope came to her country, Chile, with the coming to power of Salvador Allende, a mythical leader who promised "more passion and more affection.”  The year of his innaguration, 1973, Nona Fernández was two years old.  Since she was a girl, Fernández memorized the speech in which the president predicted a country in which tenderness would triumph, and since she was a writer, everything that happened while she was becoming a teenager and an adult became evident in the obsessions of her prose.

A consequence of that passion (and that affection) is, Mapocho (2002), her first novel, which is now published in Spain by Minúscula. Chilean Electric (2015), also in Minúscula, and La Dimension Desconocida (The Unknown Dimension) (Random), from 2016, complete a kind of trilogy that shows, from her writing, that the reality does not always have to contend with the beauty of literature. This interview was conducted through Zoom; in the background there were books, clocks, toys and an old guitar, as in the room of a girl who keeps all her memories at home.

Read entire interview in its original language: EL PAIS