Elena Knows

SHORTLISTED for the International Booker Prize 2022

After Rita is found dead in a church she used to attend, the official investigation into the incident is quickly closed. Her sickly mother is the only person still determined to find the culprit. Chronicling a difficult journey across the suburbs of the city, an old debt and a revealing conversation, Elena Knows unravels the secrets of its characters and the hidden facets of authoritarianism and hypocrisy in our society.

As an author and scriptwriter for television, Claudia Piñeiro has won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A crack in the wall). She is best known for her crime novels which are bestsellers in Argentina, Latin American and round the world. Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen. According to the prestigious newspaper La Nación, Claudia Piñeiro is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Borges and Cortázar. More recently, Piñeiro has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and for the legal recognition of writers as workers. Her fiction (as shown with Elena Knows) is stemmed in the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political and ideologically committed.

Frances Riddle lives in Buenos Aires, where she works as a translator, writer, and editor. She holds an MA in translation studies from the University of Buenos Aires and a BA in Spanish literature. Her book-length publications include A Simple Story by Leila Guerriero (New Directions, 2017); Bodies of Summer by Martín Felipe Castagnet (Dalkey Archive Press, 2017); and The Life and Deaths of Ethel Jurado (Hispabooks, 2017). This is her fourth title for Charco Press after Slum Virgin by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (2017), The German Room by Carla Maliandi (2018) and Theatre of War by Andrea Jeftanovic (2020).