Winner PEN Translates Award (UK)
Recovering from an unspecified accident, the narrator of Loop finds herself in waiting rooms of different kinds: airport departure lounges, doctors’ surgeries, and above all at home, awaiting the return of her boyfriend, who has travelled to Spain following the death of his mother. Loop is a love story told from the perspective of a contemporary Penelope who, instead of weaving and unravelling her shroud, writes and erases her thoughts in her ‘ideal’ notebook. At once, funny and thought-provoking, her thoughts range from her stationery preferences to the different scales on which life is lived, while a cast of unlikely characters cross the page, from Proust to a mysterious dwarf, from a dreamy cat to David Bowie singing ‘Wild is the Wind’. Written in an assured, irreverent style, Loop is the journal of an absence, one in which the most minute or whimsical observations open up universes. Combining aphoristic fragments with introspective narrative, and evoking Italo Calvino and Fernando Pessoa in its playfulness and wry humour, this original reflection on relationships, solitude and the purpose of writing offers a glimpse of contemporary life in Mexico City, while asking what it really means to find our place in the world.
Born in Mexico City in 1981, Brenda Lozano is a fiction writer, essayist and editor. She studied literature in Mexico and the United States. She edits the Chicago-based literary journal Make and is on the editorial board of Ugly Duckling Presse. In addition to Loop , she has published Todo o nada (All or Nothing, 2009), which is being adapted for the screen, and a book of short stories, Cómo piensan las piedras (How Stones Think, 2017). In 2015, she was recognised by the Hay Festival and the British Council as one of the leading Mexican authors under 40 years of age, and she was selected by the Hay Festival in 2017 as one of the Bogotá39, a list of the most outstanding new authors from Latin America. Loop is her first book to appear in English.
Annie McDermott is the translator of a dozen books from Spanish and Portuguese, by such writers as Mario Levrero, Ariana Harwicz, Brenda Lozano, Fernanda Trías and Lídia Jorge. She was awarded the Premio Valle-Inclán for her translation of Wars of the Interior by Joseph Zárate, and her translation of Brickmakers by Selva Almada was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. She has previously lived in Mexico City and São Paulo, Brazil, and is now based in Hastings, in the UK.
