Undiscovered. Dieser Artikel ist nicht verfügbar.Undiscovered

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

“An intimate story from the family archive that is also the infamous history of our continent.”—Valeria Luiselli, author of Lost Children Archive

Award-winning Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener delivers her stunning English breakthrough in this "appealingly raw" (NPR) and "incisive" (Publishers Weekly) work of literary autofiction that explores the legacy of colonialism through one woman’s family ties to both the colonized and colonizer.

Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.

In the wake of her father’s death, Gabriela returns to Peru. In alternating strands, she begins to probe her father’s infidelity, her own polyamorous relationship, and the history of her colonial ancestor, unpacking the legacy that is her birthright. From the eye-patched persona her father adopted to carry out his double life to the brutal racism she encounters in her ancestor Charles’s book, she traces a cycle of abandonment, jealousy, and fraud, in turn reframing her own personal struggles with desire, love, and race in this unflinching family saga.

Translated by Julia Sanches

Gabriela Wiener is a Peruvian writer and journalist. Her books include Sexographies, a collection of gonzo journalism about contemporary sex culture. Her work has been widely published in anthologies and translated into six languages. In 2018, she was awarded Peru’s National Journalism Award for her part in an investigative report on gender violence. She currently resides in Madrid.

Julia Sanches is a literary translator working from Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan. Recent translations include Undiscovered by Gabriela Wiener, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2024, Boulder by Eva Baltasar, shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, and Migratory Birds by Mariana Oliver, for which she won the 2022 PEN translation prize. Born in Brazil, she currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island.