Fabula literary evening – Ljubljana: Guadalupe Nettel

The Fabula literary evening is dedicated to the outstanding Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel, one of the most influential contemporary voices in Latin American literature. Nettel's distinctive poetics explores the boundaries between reality and the unconscious, telling the stories of socially excluded and marginalised people. Portraying otherness, her stories are laced with subtlety, empathy and psychological depth. She has received many awards for her fiction, including the Premio de Narrativa Breve Ribera del Duero and the prestigious Herralde Prize, one of the highest honours in Hispanophone literature

El huésped (The Host), Guadalupe Nettel’s debut novel, is a haunting story of a girl, Anna, inhabited by a disturbing creature – a mysterious, possibly imaginary "host". Anna wages an internal battle against this presence, which increasingly encroaches on her environment and leads to the disintegration of family ties. The novel moves between the conscious and the unconscious, exploring issues of blindness, otherness and community, questions that emerge when we fail to find our place within a society. With a remarkable sense of psychological precision, Nettel sheds light on the complex emotions that lie beneath the surface – fear, longing, acceptance and resistance. The author draws on her own experience, having been born with congenital cataract, which often inspired a sense of being an outsider, of having a disability. In the novel, she interweaves this experience with fiction, which raises important questions about the acceptance of self and others in a world that often does not tolerate deviations from the norm.

The event will be hosted by Ignac Fock, excerpts from El huésped (The Host) will be interpreted by actress Vesna Jevnikar.

The talk will be held in English, with simultaneous translation into Slovenian.

Guadalupe Nettel (1973) is a Mexican writer, author of award-winning novels and collections of short stories translated into more than twenty languages, including The Body Where I was Born, After the Winter, and Still Born which was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023. Her work addresses themes of physical and psychological otherness, anomaly and exclusion, presented as important aspects of the human experience.