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Ricardo Silva Romero is one of Colombia's most beloved writers. He is a prolific novelist, columnist, journalist, screenwriter, and film critic. In 2007 he was selected as one of the Bogot39, a list of the best young writers in Latin America. Ro Muerto is Silva Romero's first book to be published in English. Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia's master's program in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Lus in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and Too the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sofa Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia Garca Freire's This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Incln.
Praise for Río Muerto ""Colombian writer Silva Romero makes his English-language debut with a wrenching tale of murder and survival. Near the remote Colombian town of Belen del Chami, a mute man named Salomon Palacios is gunned down by hooded assassins in 1992. His distraught widow, Hipolita, sets off on a rambling odyssey of retribution, accompanied by their sons Max, 12, and Segundo, eight. Salomon, meanwhile, has become a ghost, and he meets with the ghosts of other victims of political violence. Romero captures the intensity of the family's grief, as they're poorly consoled by a gravedigger and are ignored by the police, all while Salomon shadows them, unable to intervene. Silva Romero seamlessly weaves lyrical depictions of Salomon's afterlife, a ""dense, black, clammy, stinking jungle that looked to him like hell,"" with pointed observations of the country's decades-long guerrilla war, which ""continues to break the extraordinary open hearts of thousands of Colombians."" Meadowcroft's crystalline translation introduces readers to an important Latin American voice. (Feb.)""--Publishers Weekly ""In this novel, Silva Romero explores with clarity and precision the way violence weighs on a society like Colombia, which seems to have naturalized it in a disturbing way.""--ADN Bogotá ""Written in visceral prose."" --El Tiempo ""A book that will persist as a key representative of literature dealing with the violence that devastated this country during the armed conflict."" --El Espectador ""Río Muerto is a portrait of Colombia turned into a book, a work we should have in our homes and read with our families instead of watching the news bulletins. (...) This short novel by Ricardo Silva Romero encapsulates a hope beyond the kind revealed in the story itself: the kind of hope that reflects the power of contemporary Colombian fiction to convert the horror of war into literary art."" --Diario de Paz Colombia ""In Río Muerto, Ricardo Silva Romero recreates in poetic and intense prose another side of the horror of our era."" --Abisinia Review Praise for Ricardo Silva Romero ""El Espantapájaros is a horror novel. It relates a kind of horror that is intimate and painful because it is ours, the kind we see in the news, a kind we know takes place every day in this country: it is the story of a massacre."" --PILAR QUINTANA, author of The Bitch and Abyss ""In Cómo perderlo todo, Ricardo Silva Romero infiltrates the seemingly simple lives of others, to show, in the contradictions of love, the unviability of the human condition."" --JORGE FRANCO, Colombian novelist ""Historia oficial del amor is one of the most beautiful books I have read recently, as well as one of the most poignant and moving explorations of an essential question: how to live a good life in a country as violent, mean, and cruel as the Colombia of recent decades."" --JUAN GABRIEL VÁSQUEZ ""El libro de la envidia, written in highly original prose and full of humor, is destined to become a milestone in the history of Colombian fiction."" ENRIQUE SANTOS MOLANO
