Bad Girls

Longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins.

In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Córdoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. She quickly rallies the pack to save him, and they adopt the child into their fascinating surrogate family as they have so many other outcasts, including Camila.

Sheltered in Auntie Encarna’s fabled pink house, they find a partial escape from the everyday threats of disease and violence, at the hands of clients, cops, and boyfriends. Telling their stories--of a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars--as well as her own journey from a toxic home in a small, poor town, Camila traces the life of this vibrant community throughout the 90s.

Imbuing reality with the magic of a dark fairy tale, Bad Girls offers an intimate, nuanced portrait of trans coming-of-age that captures a universal sense of the strangeness of our bodies. It grips and entertains us while also challenging ideas about love, sexuality, gender, and identity.

Camila Sosa Villada was born in 1982 in La Falda (Córdoba, Argentina). She is a writer, actress, and singer, and previously earned a living as a sex worker, street vendor, and hourly maid. She holds degrees in communication and theater from the National University of Córdoba. Her play Carnes tolendas, retrato escénicode un travesti was selected for the 2010 National Theater Festival held in La Plata. Her first novel, Bad Girls, won the Premio Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Grand Prix de l’Héroïne Madame Figaro and will be translated into six languages.

Kit Maude is a translator based in Buenos Aires. He has translated dozens of classic and contemporary Latin American writers such as Armonía Somers, Jorge Luis Borges, Lolita Copacabana, and Ariel Magnus for a wide array of publications and writes reviews and criticism for several different outlets in Spanish and English including the Times Literary Supplement, Revista Ñ and Otra Parte.