Divided Island

From the winner of the 2022 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize: a fractal exploration of a woman’s grief as she moves through disjointed segments of time.

Divided Island is the story of a woman with a neurological disorder. The day she goes in for the encephalogram that will lead to her diagnosis, she finds herself splitting in two. One of the two women she becomes decides to travel to an island to take her own life; the other remains behind. Scenes and images real and imagined gradually coalesce into the story of a life told from a singular location: a way of perceiving and describing the world, guided by cerebral dysrhythmia. Written in scraps and fragmented chapters, Divided Island is a nonlinear narrative best read as a poetic experience, in which the protagonist’s memories and dreams recompose the world and, in doing so, trouble the very notion of the self.

This slim volume makes it abundantly clear why Daniela Tarazona belongs in the company of other Sor Juana winners like Valeria Luiselli, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Almudena Grandes.

Daniela Tarazona (Mexico City, 1975) is the author of El animal sobre la piedra (Mexico, Almadía, 2008, and Argentina, Entropía, 2011). In 2012 she published her second novel El beso de la liebre (Alfaguara), which was shortlisted for the Puerto Rican Las Américas Prize in 2013. In 2020 the book Clarice Lispector. La mirada en el jardín (Lumen) was published, written by her together with Nuria Mel. Texts written by her have been translated into English and French. Her novel, Isla partida, is due to be published soon by Almadía. She has been a fellow of the Young Artists programme and is currently a member of the FONCA fund’s National Network of Artists. In 2011, she was recognized as one of 25 Latin American literary secrets by the Guadalajara International Book Fair.
Lizzie Davis is a translator, a writer, and a senior editor at Coffee House Press. Her recent translations include Juan Cárdenas’s Ornamental (a finalist for the 2021 PEN Translation Prize); Elena Medel’s The Wonders, cotranslated with Thomas Bunstead; and work by Valeria Luiselli, Pilar Fraile Amador, and Daniela Tarazona.
Kevin Gerry Dunn is a ghostwriter and Spanish/English translator whose book-length projects include COUNTERSEXUAL MANIFESTO by Paul B. Preciado (Columbia University Press); EASY READING by Cristina Morales (Jonathan Cape/Penguin UK), for which he received an English PEN Award and a PEN/Heim Grant; HUNGRY FOR WHAT by María Bastarós (Daunt); THE TYRANNY OF FLIES by Elaine Vilar Madruga (HarperCollins); NORTH TO PARADISE by Ousman Umar; and THE ANIMAL ON THE ROCK and DIVIDED ISLAND by Daniela Tarazona (Deep Vellum) in co-translation with Lizzie Davis. His short literary translations have appeared in Granta, LitHub, Financial Times, South Atlantic Quarterly, Latin American Literature Today, and Michigan Quarterly Review, and he has translated critical art texts for exhibitions at the U.S. National Gallery of Art, the Prado Museum, the Vatican Museums, the Vienna Kunsthalle, the Phillips Collection, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. He also heads the FTrMP Project, an effort to make Spanish translations of vital immigration paperwork available for free online. He holds an M.A. in Hispanic Language and Literature and a B.A. in English Literature, both from Boston University, and he teaches translation part-time at Lake Forest College and the University of Massachusetts Boston.