R?o Muerto

On the outskirts of Bel?n del Cham?, a town that has yet to appear on any map of Colombia, the mute Salom?n Palacios is murdered a few steps away from his home. His widow, the courageous and foul-mouthed Hip?lita Arenas, completely loses her sanity and confronts the paramilitaries and local politicians, challenging them to also kill her and her two fatherless sons. Yet as Hip?lita faces her husband's murderers on her desperate journey, she finds an unexpected calling to stay alive. This poetic and hypnotizing novel, told from the perspective of Salom?n's ghost, denounces the brutal killings of innocent citizens and at the same time celebrates the invisible: imagination, memories, hope, and the connection to afterlife.

Victor Meadowcroft is a translator from Spanish and Portuguese and a graduate of the University of East Anglia's master's program in literary translation. His published translations include stories by Agustina Bessa-Lu?s in Take Six: Six Portuguese Women Writers (co-translation with Margaret Jull Costa, Dedalus Books, 2018) and To?o the Infallible by Evelio Rosero (co-translation with Anne McLean, New Directions, 2022), which was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize in 2023 and longlisted for the Queen Sof?a Spanish Institute of Translation Prize in the same year. His translation of Natalia Garc?a Freire's This World Does Not Belong to Us was published by World Editions in 2022 and was shortlisted for the TA First Translation Prize and the Premio Valle Incl?n.