Katya Adaui was a finalist for the prestigious Ribera del Duero prize in 2024 with her book Un nombre para tu isla. The previous year, she received the 2023 National Literature Award of Peru for Geografía de la oscuridad. Her writing is characterized by her emphasis on ellipses, intimacy, parenthood, and the natural world. She was born in Lima, Peru and now resides in Buenos Aires.
This is an excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: Katya, thank you so much for accepting our invitation. Welcome to Hablemos, escritoras.
Katya Adaui: Thank you, Adriana. I’m so happy to be talking with you today.
A.P.: Tell us, Katya, you were born in Peru, but you live in Argentina. Why do you live there now? What do you do in Buenos Aires?
K.A.: Yes, I’ve lived in Buenos Aires for five years. I am a teacher for a really lovely degree program called The Art of Writing at the National University of the Arts. I teach a Narrative Workshop, a sort of generalized study of literature, to students who have just graduated with a film degree, and to students who are taking their very first writing workshop and need plenty of rigor, companionship, love, and compassion.
A.P.: What do you tell them when, for example, they have to start working past the fear of sharing their writing, or when they come to you with this idea that they can already write, but are in need of more guidance?
K.A.: I try to quell that anxiety around sharing their work, which everyone has when they arrive at the workshops. I tell them, “The writing comes first, that sense of peace comes first, that feeling of being proud of the material, of creating and weaving something.”
A.P.: How did you get started in literature, what were your surroundings like? What were your first experiences with reading and writing growing up in Lima?
K.A.: It all has to do with my parents’ jobs: my mother was a secretary and my father was an English teacher. So I grew up seeing my father grading tests in another language and my mother writing in shorthand all day. Back then, it was the era of the telephone, and my mom was always chatting with her secretary friends. She was the vice president of the Association of Secretaries of Peru, so she would spend her days taking down little notes that I couldn’t understand. My parents’ languages were cryptic to me and I wanted to understand them, but there were very few books at home—fortunately, my mom was a bit of a hoarder. She would buy the encyclopedias that they offered at the bank, which she would store downstairs, on a shelf. So, even from a very young age, I would crack those tomes open, wanting to know what they said, why there were drawings in them, why I didn’t understand what my dad wrote, and why I didn’t understand those signs my mom wrote down that didn’t look anything like the language she actually spoke. So there was always this temptation to read, to understand, and to pretend that I could read when I actually couldn’t.
A.P.: Katya, you have the best of two countries, Peru and Argentina. How do you view the literary scene in these two communities? Is there any kind of dialogue happening between them? What do you think is happening, what is brewing in this wonderful part of the world?
K.A.: I feel it is a privilege to exist, to live as part of two such narratively rich places, countries of storytellers and poets. But it must be said that in the Argentine publishing industry—which is quite maimed as a result of the current political landscape, due to its being quite anti-culture—there is a sense of resistance coming from independent publishers. There are municipal awards for creative writing, there are national awards, there is a National Fund for the Arts and sponsorships for literary residencies in the MALBA. In Peru, there is this feeling that everything is very nascent. We have very good independent publishers—as well as larger, more established ones—but still, Lima is so centrist that we won’t read a writer from the outskirts, unless they win a renowned prize. So it is quite an interesting situation. There is a program on the national radio called Entre libros which I hosted a few years ago in order to be able to speak about regional literature. In contrast, Argentina has very strong regional publishers with a noted presence in the capital. Selva Almada has her own regional distributor called Salvaje Federal through which she brings books from small provinces to big cities. Those dialogues are lacking in Peru, and sometimes it’s the editors who get burnt out. Their work is so laborious that they get tired and give up while, elsewhere, others persevere. There is some momentum, but also a need for more support, more dialogue.
A.P.: Katya, your work spans different genres—you mainly move between novels and short stories. I would like to know: What calls you to write in one genre or another, how do you know whether a given genre will best express your idea?
K.A.: Well, I begin to feel a bit like I’m being stalked by an idea, that is, I begin to ruminate on it when I go to sleep, when I’m in the shower or in bed. As soon as an idea comes to me, I take out my notebook, write it down, and say to myself, “I have to write about this.” It could be something I saw on the street, a piece of fruit… sometimes it’s something really silly, like a photo I found lying on the ground in Buenos Aires that says “2001” on the back. So I collect things that I find on the street, little pieces of rubbish, CDs, Polaroids, even forgotten pencil cases. I start to piece something together in my head and, when I don’t know what to write, I go back to that material and say, “This has the feel of a short story or this is for a novel.” So, therefore, it’s not that I like one genre more than the other, because they all vex me in their own way, but I love the challenge of trying new things. Even essays and newspaper articles. So I’m always trying to write something, and I do a lot of editing behind the scenes. For me, real training comes from the act of writing, no matter what it is about.
A.P.: And what do you read?
K.A.: I read children’s books, I read novels, I read short stories, I read essays, I read the newspaper a lot. My greatest sources of inspiration are actually headlines. I mostly just read the headlines, because there are some that are just so great. For example, this one is awful, but it’s very good: “Santa Claus had his own children buried in the backyard.” That was one of my inspirations for Geografía de la oscuridad. How can this person we know as Santa Claus, someone who brings gifts and the magic of Christmas, come out in disguise and kill his own children?
A.P.: One of the characteristics of your writing are these very succinct sentences. Tell us a bit more about your approach to writing.
K.A.: I really avoid condescension and prejudice in my writing; I’m more interested in work that has to do with dignity and compassion. Over the years, my writing has become less opaque and has instead gained a sense of luminosity. It’s almost as if, through my own grieving processes, of my parents, through the loss of some important relationships, my writing became a kind of celebration of life. Right now I think there’s this sense of hopelessness in both Peru and Argentina in terms of their awful governments. I truly feel like I don’t have much scope to be able to change anything. What I can contribute to the world is what I can do for my neighbor, for my partner, for my dog, the people who are close by. These acts of love, these acts that come from the heart are just small. But I feel that what I can offer, what I can do to do good, is take advantage of the fact that I adore writing and that I can turn that into an offering of love to a world that feels closed off. This is what I can do. And so, I write all over the place. I write in cafés, on the train, on the bus, on planes, even sitting on the floor of the market. Since my background is in journalism, I have a lot of experience writing with lots of noise around me and being able to detach myself from my surroundings (laughs).
A.P.: Let’s move on to your books. And, I should say, congratulations on being a finalist for the 2024 Ribera del Duero Prize. Tell us about your book Aquí hay icebergs (translated as Here Be Icebergs by Rosalind Harvey).
K.A.: I was going through a process of grieving, My father had died three years prior and my mother had just passed away. So, I left for Buenos Aires to work on my Creative Writing Master’s at UNTREF, the National University of February Third, which is directed by a poet, now a good friend, María Negroni. I told myself, “What I have to do right now is write.” So I put myself on a diet of writing. I also went on walks, went to therapy, and visited friends, but I spent a lot of time on my writing. When I finished the book, I presented it as my thesis and I expanded it and edited it a lot so that I could then submit it to Penguin Random House in Peru. And they published it about six months after I returned to Peru.
A.P.: Congratulations to you. Many of the stories in the book really focus on the relationship between what we are inwardly and what is outside of us. Tell us a bit more about these stories and what inspired them during that important moment in your life.
K.A.: For me, it doesn’t have as much to do with the Iceberg Theory of writing; for me, it has to do with the problem of water. Peru is one of the countries with the most water resources in the world, and yet more than eight million Peruvians still don’t have running water. How is that possible? In my own home, I remember there was running water on the first floor, but not the second. And, what’s more, we also have the floods that come with El Niño in the north of Peru. We go from drought to fires and then to floods. So that made me think, “What is going on with water?” Water has this strange thing about it, with how it adapts to the shape and space of whatever is containing it. So what is going on with water in all its different forms? Upon thinking about the different states of water, I came up with this concept for the book, because short story collections are always a concept, a world, they aren’t isolated facts, right? So I wanted the book to always be ruminating on this idea of water, for it to be the element that is always running through these stories.
A.P.: Wow, what you’ve said about Peru not having water is really shocking. Another of your books is Geografía de la oscuridad, which won the National Literature Prize in Peru. Many congratulations! In this book, you delve into the topic of fatherhood with an acutely intimate lens. Tell us about Geografía de la oscuridad.
K.A.: Well, in my opinion, if there’s something that language can do, it’s make you shut up (laughs). I’m very talkative… I’m gossipy, conversational, inquisitive; what I love more than anything is to converse, to listen, to talk. But when I write it’s as if there were another “me” who is more measured, which doesn’t exist in any other part of my life. I have this judiciousness that makes me say, “Who is this wise old lady who knows when to stop talking?” So, my writing is very elliptical because I need the reader to think and complete the thought with me, not for me but with me. Just like how not everyone could comprehend my father’s English or my mother’s shorthand, not everyone can engage with every piece of writing. Wanting everyone to love your writing is unrealistic. So, I took this style of writing to heart, from beginning to end in that book. Once I finished it, I said, “Well, that was fun, you tried something just for you, a certain style, now let it go.” So all of my writing after that is much less elliptical, but in Geografía de la oscuridad the techniques I used are ellipses, lists, fragments, and lots of heart.
A.P.: Of course, ellipses really strengthen your writing and, just as you were saying, allow the reader to complete an idea with you. Tell us about how you communicate your ideas in such a compact form using only nouns and verbs, but mostly through nouns and the descriptions of what is happening.
K.A.: I mean, you can’t separate the form from the content, in the sense that horror is a vortex—it sucks you down and leaves you in the deep, underground, or trapped below something. Sometimes we get lucky and the vortex itself spits us back out, but that doesn’t always happen. When I use enumeration, each word, each sentence, is colliding with the next, which creates the effect of blows to the body. So, in order to achieve this, it had to be comma after comma after comma, and testing the rhythm over and over.
A.P.: So Katya, you have a new book, Quiénes somos ahora. It’s a book that addresses fatherhood again, as well as death and motherhood, but it’s a bit different from your previous books. What was it like for you to write Quiénes somos ahora?
K.A.: For me, in terms of writing it, it was a celebration of the life I’ve been given, the only life I’ve been given. There are many moments of giving thanks to writing in this book. It was a change in how I write as well, because I moved away from the darkness, it’s much lighter. It’s still fragmentary, but much less elliptical. But something that happens, for example in Peru, is that some people say, “Where are the chapters?” because they are used to chapters. But it’s important, then, to remember we had La casa de cartón by Martín Adán, which is composed of many vignettes—it’s one of my favorite books. So, this book is a very explicit homage to Martín Adán in terms of its style.
A.P.: Katya, I have to ask, what makes a writer confess their love to their dog in a book? Dogs are a way to talk about these big topics like loss, joy, and pain, but in a way with dogs there are only happy memories, right?
K.A.: Yes, at the time I was writing this book I was reading My Dog Tulip by J.R. Ackerley, which is a really affectionate book. And it actually was my little dog who confessed their love to me, this unconditional love that dogs give. We would always sleep curled up next to each other. After the book came out, I read that single women sleep better when they sleep with their dogs in bed with them (laughs). The link between us and animals is really important to me. I work with this concept a lot in my workshops, but I make them remember that it’s not just vertebrates. In my own writing I always try to remember the other lives that live alongside us, no matter how diminuitive or small.
A.P.: Well, Katya, thank you for this beautiful conversation and congratulations on all of your work.
K.A.: Thank you, Adriana. It was such a pleasure to talk with you. Long live Hablemos, escritoras and thank you for supporting us every day through your work.
Translated by Kathleen Meredith
You can hear and read the full interview at Hablemos, escritoras.
You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
