In this episode, guest host Dr. Shelby Vincent, research associate in the Center for Translation Studies and lecturer in the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, interviews Colombian writer, art critic and curator, Juan Cárdenas and translator Lizzie Davis about Juan’s English-language debut novel Ornamental (Coffee House Press, 2020).
Juan was named one the thirty-nine best Latin American writers under the age of thirty-nine by the Hay Festival in Bogotá in 2017. He is the author of several novels including Zumbido, Los estratos, and Ornamento (2015). Juan is also a translator, who has translated the works of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Gordon Lish, Machado de Assis, and Eça de Queiros. He currently coordinates the Masters program in Creative Writing at the Caro y Cuervo Institute in Bogotá, where he works as a professor and researcher.
Lizzie Davis is a writer, translator from Spanish and Italian to English, and editor at Coffee House Press. She has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference and Omi International Arts Center for her translations. Lizzie is passionate about championing writing that takes risks and pushes boundaries thematically or formally. She has co-translated Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, an important book at this moment of crisis for unaccompanied minors at the US-Mexico border, and translated Juan Cárdenas’s novel Ornamental, which is the topic of this podcast episode.

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