Camila Sosa Villada - Soy una tonta por quererte

2022, Argentina, Camila Sosa Villada, Spanish,

Original title: "Soy una tonta por quererte" (I'm a fool for loving you) by Camila Sosa Villada.

"In the middle of the 90s, a woman earns her living as a surrogate bride for gay men. In a Harlem smoking room, a Latina transvestite becomes intimately acquainted with none other than Billie Holiday. A group of rugby players haggle over the price of a night of sex and in return get their comeuppance. Nuns, grandmothers, children and dogs are never what they seem... The nine stories that make up this book are inhabited by quirky and deeply human characters who confront an ominous reality in ways as strange as themselves.

Soy una tonta por quererte confirms that Camila Sosa Villada is one of the most powerful and original voices in contemporary literature. Owner of a dazzling and daring imagination, she is capable of both speaking the language of a victim of the Mexican Inquisition and of building a dystopian universe where transvestite existence takes its revenge. Owner of a unique style, Sosa crosses the boundaries between reality and magic in these tales, honoring the oral tradition with unparalleled ease and solidity."

According to Wikipedia, Camila Sosa Villada is a transgender Argentine writer, theatre, film, and television actress1. She was born on 28 January 1982 in La Falda, Argentina. Throughout her childhood, she moved around the Córdoba Province, living in a number of cities including Cruz del Eje, Los Sauces, Mina Clavero, and Córdoba1. She studied Social Communication for three years and another four years for her bachelor’s degree at the National University of Córdoba.

In 2009, Villada premiered her play ‘Carnes tolendas, retrato escénico de un travesti’, a biodrama of her life that fused her personal experiences that she recorded on her blog, ‘La Novia de Sandro’, with the poetry of Federico García Lorca1. Her first novel, ‘Las malas’ (2019), about a group of travestis who practice street prostitution in Parque Sarmiento, became a critical and public success and catapulted her to fame, establishing her as one of the most original writers of contemporary Argentine literature and LGBT literature in Argentina. The work won numerous literary awards, such as the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and was translated into several languages such as French, English, German, Croatian, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Swedish.

She set the example for other transgender women, proving that a career from a street worker to a famous writer and actress is possible. This is what she said about her childhood: "As a child, I imagined that I was going to act, that I would do theater, cinema, but not that I was going to live from this. I started dressing at the age of 16 in a village of 5000 inhabitants. I know very well what it was like to be a transvestite in a town like that 20 years ago. It was doubly burdensome."

Available via Amazon

Wikipedia

Photo via Facebook