Agustina Bazterrica

Agustina Bazterrica is an Argentinian novelist and short story writer. Her second novel, Tender Is the Flesh, won the prestigious Premio Clarin Novela and has been translated into twenty-three languages.

Agustina Bazterrica was born and grew up in Buenos Aires. As a young adult, she briefly considered becoming an opera singer and then studied Fine Arts at The University of Buenos Aires. For 22 years, she balanced creative writing with secretarial work, publishing a novel (Matar a la Niña, or Kill the Girl) in 2013.

It was followed by a collection of short stories, Antes del encuentro feroz (Before the Fierce Encounter), in 2016. Many of them were later republished as part of 19 Claws.

First published in 2017, Tender Is the Flesh won the Premio Clarín de Novela award for Spanish literature. The novel is set in a world where cannibalism has been legalized after a virus renders animal meat unfit for human consumption. That novel exposes the violence in a woman's everyday life through often shocking prose.

“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is — it teaches us to naturalize cruelty,” Bazterrica says to Guardian.

In 2021, after the English-language publication of Tender Is the Flesh, Bazterrica quit her job to focus on writing.

The sense of ever-present threat permeates the author’s short story collection, 19 Claws and a Black Bird (2023), translated by Sarah Moses, which serves up a smörgåsbord of assault, murder, and suicide. In 19 Claws, Bazterrica resumes the study of the macabre that characterized Tender Is the Flesh.

Several of the stories in Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird have also won awards, including First Prize in the 2004/2005 City of Buenos Aires Awards for Unpublished Stories and First Prize in the Edmundo Valadés Awards for the Latin American Short Story, among others.

Agustina Bazterrica lives in Buenos Aires.

Photo credit: Twitter @AgusBazterrica