"When you grow up in a dysfunctional family, I think it makes you more sensitive to violence around you. Because you learn to read behind the perfect facade of the family that you have to put up with. To have an alcoholic parent makes you hide everything from everyone. And you can detect when people are lying," says Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor in this week's episode.

Fernanda started out as a journalist but now is an awarded novelist, whose book Hurricane Season (Spanish: Temporada de huracanes) is translated in over 35 language and won the International Literature Award of the Haus der Kulturen in Germany and was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize last year.

However, this conversation is not about the books that Fernanda has written but rather about the themes and topics she explores. For instance, what is the impact of violence in everyday life, what the lack of love does to people and communities, how the crisis of identity and inner conflict might break us and how to find the escape routes when you feel trapped in a reality that is hard to bear?

The whole publication: https://nara.lt/en/articles-en/fernanda-melchor

Author and photographer: Berta Tilmantaitė

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