Alia Trabucco Zerán

Alia Trabucco Zerán trained as a lawyer in Santiago before earning an MFA in creative writing in Spanish at New York University on a Fulbright scholarship. She later completed a PhD in Spanish and Latin American Studies at University College London. That legal and academic background runs through her work: several of her books read like investigations, structured around cases, testimonies, and the slow accumulation of evidence.

Her fiction and narrative non-fiction orbit what a dictatorship leaves behind in the people it didn't directly kill. In The Remainder, three young adults drive a hearse up the Andes; the novel alternates between Felipe's obsessive body-counting monologues and Iquela's more restrained recollections. When Women Kill takes a different approach: Zerán re-examines the criminal cases of four Chilean women who committed homicide, weaving her own research diary into a feminist reading of the files. Clean, her second novel, shifts the lens to a domestic worker questioned after her employer's daughter dies under ambiguous circumstances.

The Remainder was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize.

For a first read, The Remainder is the most accessible entry point. The road-trip frame gives the novel real momentum, and the two alternating voices keep the political inheritance concrete rather than abstract. You don't need to know Chilean history to feel the weight of a count that never resolves, or the strangeness of a mother hugging the wrong woman while saying don't ever forget.