Anna Lidia in Madrid

On Friday 27 June, Anna Lidia Vega Serova and translator Robin Munby held an event at the Desperate Literature bookshop in Madrid, to promote the new English edition of Anima Fatua, published by Amaurea Press on 12 June.

Anna Lidia and Robin alternated readings in Spanish and English of choice scenes from the book, along with a conversation about the inspiration behind the novel, and Anna Lidia’s experiences in writing it.

Anna Lidia spent the whole of June in Europe, promoting another book of hers, recently published in Slovenia: Tribade brez plemena (translated by Sara Virk). She travelled to Slovenia, Italy, France and Portugal during her visit. But Madrid was her main base. She’s now back in Havana, but we are looking forward to bringing out more work by her over the coming year.

In Anima Fatua, Vega Serova offers an unsettling coming-of-age story set in the tumultuous final years of the Soviet Union. Ali, the novel’s charismatic and complex protagonist, must navigate a world of racial, linguistic and sexual isolation amidst the chaos of perestroika. Her journey, marked by cruelty and violence, reveals the resilience and agency of a young woman who refuses to conform to victimhood. Through Vega Serova’s vivid portrayal of Alia, readers are thrust into a world that is both surreal and heartbreaking – a queer, feminist Cuban narrative unlike any seen before.

Robin has commented: “As a translator, I am always drawn to books that feel as though they could never have been written in English. This book feels like it could have been written by no one else. It is not just the dizzying story itself, which lurches from fairytale to nightmare in the blink of an eye, but Anna Lidia’s twisted, playful approach to language. Anima Fatua is a book that resists interpretation at every turn.”

Having already won an English PEN Translates award for the translation, we are now submitting Anima Fatua to the International Book Prize 2026.

Praise for Anima Fatua:

“A journey to the Soviet Union, around it, and back to Cuba in the 1980s that is fraught with disunion and sorrow, but also joy and desire.” Jacqueline Loss, Dreaming in Russian

“Vega Serova's fiction reads like a gallery of antiheroines.” Mabel Cuesta, Cambridge History of Cuban Literature

“Her writing is seductive. Sometimes it provokes tenderness and sometimes pain. A novel of harsh beauty, it gets under your skin.” Karla Suárez, author of Havana Year Zero

Anima Fatua has been featured in Latin American Literature Today.

Photograph by Eldimarys Curry-Machado