Papucaru

A teenaged refugee chases stardom but finds her purpose in Canada’s abortion-rights movement. Fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup, sixteen-year-old Paulina and her older brother Ernesto settle in Toronto. While Ernesto dreams of a glorious homecoming, Paulina embraces her liberation from the conventional life expected of her back home. Yet despite landing her first big role on a popular children’s cartoon, and her first girlfriend, she cannot escape survivor’s guilt. Haunted by the death of a childhood friend, she joins the underground struggle for reproductive freedom. But when a fellow exile pleads for her help terminating a pregnancy, Paulina’s public and private selves threaten to collide.

Rebecca Papucaru’s debut collection, The Panic Room (Nightwood Editions) was awarded the 2018 Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry and was also a finalist for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry (Quebec Writers’ Federation) and longlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (League of Canadian Poets). Her short fiction has appeared in Grain, Event, The Dalhousie Review, and The New Quarterly; ＂Yentas＂ was awarded The Malahat Review’s 2020 Novella Prize. Her first novel will be published by Guernica Editions in 2025. She lives in Montreal.