Pulitzer winner Cristina Rivera Garza on subverting gender violence

Books by Mexican author and professor Cristina Rivera Garza tend to defy expectation and genre. In 2020, Rivera Garza was named a MacArthur Genius Fellow, and in 2024, her book, Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography. Her latest work is a translation of her 2007 novel La muerte me da (Death Takes Me), translated by Robin Myers and Sarah Booker.

Death Takes Me, according to Rivera Garza, is a provocation into an imagined string of murders. With each body, a poem by the Argentine writer Alejandra Pizarnik marks the scene of the crime.

“This novel is veering away from a plot based narrative,” Rivera Garza said of the complex storylines in this book. “There is a detective, a woman detective who finds herself suddenly in charge of a very gruesome, enigmatic series of killings against men in a city that is plagued by violence.”

This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

This interview was produced for digital by Majd Al-Waheidi.