Fernanda Melchor, a leading figure in contemporary Mexican literature

Her name almost always comes up when discussing contemporary Latin American literature. Mexican Fernanda Melchor is one of the leading figures in this very dynamic literary scene, driven in particular by female writers . After translating Hurricane Season and Paradaïze, published in Spanish in 2017 and 2021, Grasset is offering one of her first works in French: Ici, c'est pas Miami, chronicles on the state of Veracruz, on the east coast of the country, where she is from.

The author, a feminist, is a journalist by training. And this book, published in Mexico in 2013, was born from an investigation carried out in 2002, “on the case of the lynching of a rapist in an isolated village in her native state. A story that she included in her collection of chronicles,” explained El Sol de México last October . The newspaper echoed a speech by Fernanda Melchor, who, during a university literary festival, looked back on her career.

During her studies, the author worked in the library and historical archives of the city of Veracruz and immersed herself in Mexican crime anthologies and French collections belonging to the region's prominent families in the 18th century. “I spent my time reading them and each time I wanted to reconstruct the whole story, but it all contradicted what was happening in Veracruz. And I think that played a role when I wanted to write about it,” the novelist said. “ Moreover, this is felt in a book like Here, It's Not Miami, which always goes back, plunges back into the 1970s and 1960s and to a time when I was still a child and which I don't remember. I tried to reconstruct genealogies and narrative threads from these stories.”

International recognition came with Hurricane Season, which The New York Times ranked among the 100 best books of the ^21st century . The newspaper compared it to the American William Faulkner (1897-1962) “in his baroque and often terrifyingly brutal way of describing poverty, paranoia and murder.”