Divided Island - Paperback

by Daniela Tarazona (Author), Lizzie Davis (Translator), Kevin Gerry Dunn (Translator)

From the winner of the 2022 Sor Juana Inéeacute;s de la Cruz Prize: a fractal exploration of a woman's grief as she moves through disjointed segments of time.

Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind. Scenes and images real and imagined gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by cerebral dysrhythmia. Written in scraps and fragmented chapters, Divided Island is a nonlinear narrative best read as a poetic experience, in which the protagonist's memories and dreams recompose the world and, in doing so, trouble the very notion of the self.

This slim volume makes it abundantly clear why Daniela Tarazona belongs in the company of other Sor Juana winners like Valeria Luiselli, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Almudena Grandes.

Author Biography

Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of El animal sobre la piedra (Mexico, Almadía, 2008, and Argentina, Entropía, 2011), forthcoming as The Animal on the Rock from Deep Vellum. In 2012, she published her second novel El beso de la liebre (Alfaguara), which was shortlisted for the Las Américas Prize in 2013. In 2020, the book Clarice Lispector: La mirada en el jardín (Lumen) was published, co-written by Tarazona and Nuria Mel. Her work has been translated into English and French. She has been a fellow of Mexico's Young Artists program and is currently a member of the FONCA fund's National Network of Artists. In 2011, she was recognized as one of twenty-five Latin American literary secrets by the Guadalajara International Book Fair. In 2022, she received the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Divided Island.

Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and former senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas's Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize) and The Devil of the Provinces; Elena Medel's The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.

Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant) and work by Paul B. Preciado, María Bastarós, Elaine Vilar Madruga, Ousman Umar, Daniela Tarazona, Javier Castillo, Paco Cerdà, and Cristian Perfumo.