In Conversation with Mariana Enriquez A Sunny Place for Shady People
6pm, Wednesday 6 August
Harry Hartog ANU Campus
University Avenue, Acton, ACT, 2601
In collaboration with SLLL (School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU), the Spanish Studies Program and AILASA (the Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia) – International Booker Prize shortlisted author Mariana Enriquez will be in conversation with Dr. Fabricio Tocco on her latest collection of short stories A Sunny Place for Shady People and will be discussing her extensive body of work.
Nobel Prize for Literature winner Kazuo Ishiguro recently hailed the Argentinian writer Mariana Enriquez as “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time”.
A Sunny Place for Shady People - Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imagination of Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror, the surreal, and the supernatural.
Translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, A Sunny Place for Shady People showcases Enriquez’s unique blend of the literary and the horrific, and underscores why Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, calls her “the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”
About Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Argentina. Her works have been translated into over 20 languages. Known for her gothic and macabre stories, interspersed with incisive social critique, Enriquez’s style is often likened to Stephen King or Margaret Atwood. Her short story collection The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2021, Hogarth, translated by Megan McDowell) was short listed for the international Booker Prize, and her novel Our Share of the Night (2019, Hogarth, translated by Megan McDowell) won the Herralde Prize in 2019, one of the most prestigious literary awards of the Spanish-speaking world.
About Dr. Fabricio Tocco
Dr. Fabricio Tocco is an Argentine-Brazilian writer, musician, and lecturer at the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, at the ANU. He is the author of the novel Parece diciembre (2025, Equidistancias) and two academic books, Latin American Detectives against Power (Lexington, ICFA Book Prize 2022) and Precarious Secrets (2025, University of Texas Press), which inspired the documentary Secretos Precarios (SBS on Demand, 2025). He has released three albums, including Las aventuras perdidas (Club del Disco, 2022), a musical adaptation of the book of the same name by Alejandra Pizarnik.