The Cursed Ones

"An impressive literary debut, free from self-pity, «As Malditas» finds the brilliance of a life without limits through a language of memory, inventiveness, tenderness and blood. A group portrait told through a reimagining of mythology, an explosive manifesto about the strength, pain and will to survive of a group of trans women who wanted to be queens: «What nature does not give, hell lends.»

That was the origin of this book, that is the alchemy that runs through its pages: the transformation of shame, fear, intolerance, contempt and misunderstanding into high-quality prose. Because As Malditas is a story of childhood and a ritual of initiation, a fairy tale and a horror story, a group portrait, a political manifesto, an explosive memoir, a guided tour of its author's dazzling imagination and a unique chronicle that comes to pollinate literature.

In its DNA converge the two facets of the trans world that most repel and frighten polite society: the fury of being trans and the party of being trans. And in its literary voice converge the three parts of Camila's holy trinity: the Marguerite Duras part, the Wisława Szymborska part and the Carson McCullers part. The appropriation of Lorca and Jean Cocteau that Camila made on stage is once again seen in these pages with what she managed to extract from Duras, Szymborska and Carson, without losing at any moment that essential Cordoban cadence she maintains.

To put it plainly, As Malditas is the kind of book we want the whole world to read, as soon as we finish it. (Juan Forn)"

Camila Sosa Villada (born in 1982, in La Falda, Argentina) is an actress, poet and writer. She has become one of the most intense voices in contemporary Latin American literature. A trans woman, she transforms her experience into an aesthetic and political battlefield. In As Malditas, she gives body to a poetics of survival, where scandal is the purest form of truth. To read Camila is to understand that literature can still be an act of danger, and of grace.