Claudia Piñeiro is among the most decorated writers in Latin America today. Born in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, her work across the genres of crime and literary fiction has seen her become Argentina’s most translated author after Borges and Cortázar. Piñeiro is also a social force within her own country, deeply involved in Argentina’s 2020 legalisation of abortion, now threatened by President Javier Milei. Among her many awards is a shortlisting for the 2022 International Booker Prize for Elena sabe – Elena Knows in Frances Riddle’s acclaimed translation – in which a woman with Parkinson’s attempts to discover if her daughter’s suicide was in fact a murder. Piñeiro spoke in Spanish with our editor James Appleby, who then translated this interview into English.
I’d like to start with your specific conception of the crime novel. In Elena Knows, the plot is one with ‘No suspects, or motives, or theories, just the death… she had never in her life committed any crime.’ What interests you more, crime as set out in the penal code, or more subtle interpersonal crimes?
The truth is that I never sit down with the idea of writing a crime novel. My novels are always about characters within society, and as I write, a crime appears in their lives almost as if it were an accident. I’d never write about a serial killer – I’m always attracted to characters who might be anyone, whose criminality isn’t pre-determined. Sometimes that crime is, as you say, legally defined, but in other situations no written law is broken, and yet the crime is somehow worse.
I’ll give you one example from a book that hasn’t been translated into English yet: Catedrales [Cathedrals]. The central idea is that each of the characters shares some responsibility for the death of a girl some thirty years before. But none of those responsibilities is a legally defined crime, and in fact the only literal criminal has been committed the girl herself. Whether her actions should have been outlawed by society, I don’t think so. And so we’re into the discussion of what a crime is, what it is not, how society judges crime, and how the penal code can drag behind public opinion – all of which interests me far more than the fact of a crime itself.
In stories like Con las manos atadas [Bound Hands], where a man and woman are tied together in the wake of a robbery, or Elena Knows, where Rita, the daughter who will later die by suicide, is disgusted by the physical care she must take of her mother, crime and the body are intimately linked. How exactly are they interwoven in your fiction?
The body is fundamental to all my fiction – so much so, in fact, that the original title of Elena Knows was The Bodies of Others. There’s always someone judging the body, making decisions for it, acting on its behalf – whether that’s the character of Rita as she cuts her mother’s toenails, or the decision that doctors take on Elena’s behalf. And so Elena Knows doesn’t just tell the story of Rita’s suicide but the story of Elena’s body.
There’s a personal edge, in that my mother had Parkinson’s, and one thing I always noticed was how people would look away. In her essays on illness, Sontag talks about how we’re told to look away from people with disabilities: you mustn’t stare. As if the ill person might be worried by all this. And so those people suffer not only their illnesses but the inability to meet another’s eye.
And that hurts. I saw it in my mother – everyone looked away. Every day she hunched further over, and still they wouldn’t look. And so when I wrote Elena Knows, it was as if I were doing a hyper-close-up on Elena’s body. Perhaps there are people who can’t read a novel like that, but at least there’s no looking away.
I wondered if you could talk about the short story or ‘cuento’ in the context of Argentina, which feels quite different to its role and importance of the story in the English-speaking world. What is the influence of the cuento on your writing?
It’s just as you say: the short story is key to us in Argentina. Our most emblematic writer, Borges, was of course a writer of short stories, and the stories of Cortázar are still alive among our students. Not only are there are many other excellent writers of stories, we simply don’t have the tradition of writing five-hundred-page, six-hundred-page novels. Even our novels are story-sized. When your entire tradition pushes you towards a certain way of reading, of course that also leads to a certain way of writing. So I have the greatest respect for the cuento, with all its watchmaker’s precision.
Because short stories have to be more precise. A novel allows you a certain amount of digression; subplots that the cuento simply can’t. And I think, if we’re honest, even when we read the novels of authors we love, we sometimes say to ourselves, maybe you could’ve cut a page or two. The moment a story overflows, it collapses.
Many of my stories I wrote as part of literary talleres: these are something between a workshop and a seminar, another part of Argentina’s literary scene that I don’t think is common in your culture. Our talleres came together under our country’s dictatorships, where writers needed a private space to share texts. They did so in an author’s house – the greatest authors in our country – sitting around a table with a coffee, reading, getting feedback. And the dynamic of the taller fits that of the cuento much better than the novel: you have to share that time with others too.
Could you talk to me about so-called genre fiction? Crime, television, romance, sci-fi: what’s their the influence on your work?
I’m not afraid of genres – it’s another part of the literary tradition here in Argentina. No one is saying that Borges was an author of genre fiction, but still he studied the crime novel, gave speeches on it, and published crime fiction from around the world. When the great masters of your country are admirers of genre, that gives you all the permission you need. There’s no shortage of literary authors in Argentina who write at the boundary of genres.
We simply don’t have the hierarchy that exists in other parts of the world, and we don’t see crime fiction as below the rest. It’s the same with horror, science fiction and other genres. There are novels so spectacular that they transcend genre. They have nothing to do with all these hierarchies, which, I have to say, don’t interest me in the least.
It’s impossible to speak to an author of such political commitment, especially in relation to women’s rights, without coming to Argentina. As we speak, the Argentine pope is critically ill and the Argentine president is eroding your country’s right to abortion. What are your thoughts on the religious and political situation your country is currently living?
The politics of my country? Constant bitterness. Every day I wake up thinking, what now? I belong to a number of groups attacked by the president: women, cultural workers, people concerned with human rights and social justice. And Milei is permanently on the attack, with the most ruthless, despicable kind of insults – and against women most of all.
It isn’t a pleasant climate to live in, and that’s before we get to events like the $Libra Cryptocurrency Scandal or his desire to appoint supreme court judges by decree. All this bleeds into my writing, of course – it’s impossible for it not to. The relationship between power and sexuality is the subject of novel I’m currently working on: what is the sexuality of power? Everything we see in the actions of Trump and Musk is one hypermasculine boast, and we can see it in the speeches of our own president too, which so often involve pornographic metaphors: the size of the penis of a donkey being just one example.
Those of us who write from the margins of power – authors from Latin America, women, LGBTQIA+ authors – we have to write like dogs digging a hole. Or the way a rat digs its burrow: with violence. Writing by force is the only way for us to be heard. We have to use all the tools at our disposition and make our demands. The Feminist movement has ensured that we have a seat of the tables of power, something we didn’t have previously. But it’s always hard to know if those advances will continue or if the next step will be backwards.
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You can find out more about Claudia Piñeiro and her work on the websites of Charco and Bitter Lemon Press. Piñeiro is the International Author of the Day at The London Book Fair 2025 (Olympia London, 11-13 March).
For more on the work of Frances Riddle, International-Booker-nominated translator of Elena Knows.
This original Spanish of this interview can be read online on the Interpret blog at www.interpretmagazine.com/blog
Photo credits: Alejandra López
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