Giovanna Rivero

We are truly honoured to be welcoming Bolivian author Giovanna Rivero, as well as her translator Isabel Adey, in the Bookshop for a brilliant night celebrating the English publication of Fresh Dirt from the Grave. With shipwrecks, dive bars, and exploring themes of possession, and science, Giovanna's collection of short stories plants itself at the muddy intersection of gothic horror and science fiction. Suffice to say that Giovanna's world is one where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet.

In Fresh Dirt from the Grave, a collision of harshness and tenderness animates Giovanna Rivero's stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women's prison. Murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going.

Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope. Giovanna and Isabel will be in conversation with fiction writer and editor Heather Parry. We hope you can join us for what promises to be a truly fantastic event with Charco Press, one of our booksellers' favourite local and independent publisher.

Giovanna Rivero was born in the city of Montero, Santa Cruz, Bolivia in 1972 and is a writer of short stories and novels. She holds a doctorate in Hispano-American literature. In 2011, she was selected by the Guadalajara Book Fair as one of the 25 upcoming stars of Latin American literature. She is the author of multiple books of short stories, books for children and novels. Her literary work, which moves between horror literature and science fiction, is regarded as an immense contribution to the renovation of the fantastic genre in Latin America.

Isabel Adey is a translator (Spanish and German to English) and editor based in Edinburgh. Former winner of the Goethe-Institut Emerging Translators' Program, she has taught translation at the postgraduate level and has been translating professionally since 2011.

Heather Parry is the co-founder and Editorial Director of Extra Teeth magazine. She won the 2016 Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer, Cove Park's 2017 Emerging Writer residency, the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize in 2021 and was a Hawthornden Fellow in 2021. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was released in October 2022 by Gallic Books, and a short story collection - This Is My Body, Given For You - is forthcoming from Haunt Publishing