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Carolina De Robertis

Biography

Carolina De Robertis

Carolina De Robertis is the author of five novels, including CANTORAS, winner of a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award, and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; it was also selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work has been translated into 17 languages and she has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Italy’s Rhegium Julii Prize, and numerous other honors. An author of Uruguayan origins, she teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland, California, with her wife and two children.

Carolina De Robertis

Books by Carolina De Robertis

by Carolina De Robertis - Fiction

The former president of an unnamed Latin American country receives a journalist in his famed gardens to discuss his legacy and the dire circumstances that threaten democracy around the globe. Once known as the Poorest President in the World, his reputation is the stuff of myth: a former guerilla who was jailed for inciting revolution before becoming the face of justice, human rights and selflessness for his nation. Now, as he talks to the journalist, he wonders if he should reveal the strange secret of his imprisonment: while held in brutal solitary confinement, he survived, in part, by discussing revolution, the quest for dignity, and what it means to love a country, with the only creature who ever spoke back --- a loud-mouth frog.

by Carolina De Robertis - Fiction, Women's Fiction

In 1977 Uruguay, a military government has crushed political dissent with ruthless force. In an environment where citizens are kidnapped, raped and tortured, homosexuality is a dangerous transgression. And yet, Romina, Flaca, Anita "La Venus," Paz and Malena --- five cantoras, women who "sing" --- somehow, miraculously, find one another and then discover an isolated, nearly uninhabited cape, Cabo Polonio, which they claim as their secret sanctuary. Over the next 35 years, their lives move back and forth between Cabo Polonio and Montevideo, the city they call home. And throughout, again and again, the women will be tested --- by their families, lovers, society and one another --- as they fight to live authentic lives.