Margarita García Robayo, Charlotte Coombe

Margarita García Robayo was born in 1980 in Cartagena, Colombia, and now lives in Buenos Aires where she has worked as a journalist and scriptwriter. She is the author of three novels, a book of autobiographical essays and several collections of short stories, including Worse Things, which obtained the prestigious Casa de las Américas Prize in 2014. Her books have been published widely and praised in Latin America and Spain and have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Hebrew and Turkish. Holiday Heart is her second book to appear in English after the very successful Fish Soup, selected by the TLS as one of the best fiction titles of 2018.

Charlotte Coombe is a British literary translator, working from French and Spanish. Her translation of Abnousse Shalmani’s Khomeini, Sade and Me (2016) won a PEN Translates award in 2015. She has translated authors such as Marvel Moreno, Anna Soler-Pont and Asha Miró, Edgardo Nuñez Caballero, Rosa María Roffiel and Santiago Roncagliolo. She is also the translator of Eduardo Berti’s novel The Imagined Land (2018). For Charco Press, she has translated three titles, namely: Ricardo Romero’s The President’s Room (2017), and Margarita García Robayo’s Fish Soup (2018) (Shortlisted for the Valle Inclán Translation Prize in 2019) and Holiday Heart (2020). For more information, you can peruse her portfolio and blog.