We are very pleased to announce that Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s Anima Fatua, translated from Spanish into English by Robin Munby and due to be published by Amaurea in June 2025, has won an English PEN, PEN Translates Award (supported by the Arts Council of England).
The first book that Amaurea published was a translation of Anna Lidia’s poetry (Un Jardín en Miniatura/A Miniature Garden), followed by her translated short-story collection, Sideways Glance. Wanting to continue publishing English translations of her work, we spoke to her, and she said that she had already given permission to Robin Munby to translate Anima Fatua into English, and attempt to find a publisher. Robin’s translation impressively succeeds in conveying Anna Lidia’s very personal voice into English.
Robin commented: “When I first read Anima Fatua, a couple of things about it struck me straightaway. Firstly, while it is written in Spanish, it feels as much like a Russian novel as it does a Cuban one. Not just because it’s set largely in Russia, but from its emotional intensity, its dark humour, and the fact it is littered with references to Russian literature and poetry. And then there’s the protagonist, Alia. Anima Fatua takes its reader to some very dark places at times, but her force of character drives us on. She’s not always likeable, sometimes cruel, but never dull.”
The transnational nature of Anna Lidia’s writing is particularly striking, and unusual. It has led her to become a significant voice in contemporary Cuban literature. We feel that the combination of her Cuban-Russian identity, and prominence as a key female and gay literary voice who writes with an honesty coming from personal experience, makes this book particularly interesting.
Anima Fatua is a kaleidoscopic coming-of-age novel about a young girl named Alia. Alia’s Cuban father and Russian mother get divorced when she is 9, and she leaves Cuba – and her best friend Malena – for Soviet Russia. Forced to negotiate her otherness – linguistic, racial, sexual – in a country starting to fall apart at the seams, she flees her unhappy existence in a provincial Russian town and is swept up in the maelstrom of perestroika, freer than ever before, but also more exposed. Relying on acquaintances and strangers for a place to live, she discovers the Soviet Union’s hippie subculture. She soon embraces that lifestyle, meeting a host of larger-than-life characters, including a man who calls himself John Lennon, a mystic named Ofelia and a terrifying moustachioed psychoanalyst. Ultimately, however, none of those she meets can fill the void left by her separation from Malena, her first great love.
Born in the former USSR, to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, Anna Lidia settled definitively in Havana, Cuba, in 1989. Originally a visual artist, in 1997 she won the Premio David for her first short-story collection, Bad Painting. She has become a recognised figure in the Cuban literary scene, with eight short-story collections, three books of poetry and two novels, participating in literary events throughout Europe and the Americas. Through both her words and her painting, her work is noteworthy for its very personal reflection of daily life, grindingly yet magically real, as experienced in present-day Cuba.
Many of her short stories have appeared in English, in publications such as American Chordata, Exchanges, Guernica, Two Lines, Words Without Borders and Your Impossible Voice. In 2019, she completed a tour of US universities, speaking about her creative process, as well as about race and gender in Cuba.
‘The central role offered to the women characters and their philosophical and existential differences allows them to speak to the different ways of inhabiting gender in the contemporary and postmodern era, with its diverging and at times even antagonistic viewpoints on the subject. […] Anima Fatua is without doubt one of the greatest examples of the way in which [Cuban] women have taken the written word by the horns, how, in spite of everything, they have taken ownership of it.’ (Cuban novelist and critic Marilyn Bobes in her column La Esquina de Padura, for Inter Press Service)
‘In 2008 [sic], Vega Serova finally published her long-awaited autobiographical novel: Anima Fatua. If there ever existed a mythological codification of the members of the agua tibia generation [Cubans with mixed Cuban-Soviet heritage], this would quite probably be it’ (From the essay collection Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience.)
‘Anima Fatua is a much-needed literary work. Anna Lidia Vega Serova is a unique feminine voice amongst Cuban novelists…. Anna Lidia’s prose offers us a lacerating counterpoint that reveals a shared identity, in which flourish psychological, social and sexual struggles, generated as much out of love, as out of upheaval.’ (Marta Rojas, review in Cuban newspaper Granma)
‘Anna Lidia Vega Serova’s shocking realism readily provokes our empathy. The narration, predominantly in the first person, comes across as so real, that the story appears to be an autobiographical confession.’ (René Camilo García Rivera, review in Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde)
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