A Discussion on Carlos Fonseca's 'Austral'

Carlos Fonseca

Assistant Professor, Postcolonial Latin American Literature

University of Cambridge

Carlos Fonseca was born in Costa Rica in 1987, brought up in Puerto Rico and graduated from Princeton in 2014.  He was selected by the Hay Festival as part of the Bogotá 39 group (2016), by Granta managazine as one of the twenty-five best young Spanish-language writers (2021) and by Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the twenty most promising writers in the world for their "Young Shapers of the Future" series (2022).  His previous novels are Colonel Lágrimas and Natural History, both translated by Megan McDowell.  His work has been translated into more than ten languages.  He is Assistant Professor of Postcolonial Latin American Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a fellow of Trinity College.  His latest novel, Austral, has been described by The New York Times as "a masterly voyage of discovery, both physical and intellectual."

Xita Rubert

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature

Princeton University

Writer and Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature