Anna Lidia Vega SErova
The first English translation of the controversial semi-autobiographical novel
Translated by Robin Munby
Winner English PEN Translates Award 2025
In Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova draws on her own experiences of growing up in the late Soviet Union to craft a deeply unsettling coming-of-age novel. In the wake of her parents’ divorce, Alia the novel’s beguiling protagonist, is forced to negotiate her linguistic, racial and sexual otherness amid the maelstrom of perestroika. Despite the many horrors to which she is exposed, largely at the hands of the novel’s grim menagerie of male characters, Alia exerts her own agency at every turn. More antihero than tragic victim, Alia responds in kind to the cruelty around her, she confounds and enthralls as she leads us on a harrowing
journey through a country on the brink.
Anima Fatua will appeal to readers of Margarita García Robayo, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya or Sayaka Murata looking to delve back into a world of complex, charismatic women. This novel comes in the wake of short stories published in Words Without Borders, Guernica, American Chordata, Two Lines and New England Review. Listen to an extract from the novel on YouTube channel Translators Aloud here.
“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.” Translator Robin Munby.
Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby – a translation that has been awarded an English PEN Translates prize. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour.
Anna Lidia Vega Serova
Born in the former Soviet Union, to a Russian/Ukrainian mother and Cuban father, Anna Lidia Vega Serova settled definitively in Havana, Cuba in 1989. Originally a visual artist, it was her writing that brought her to international prominence, starting with her winning the Premio David in 1997 for her first collection of short stories, Bad Painting. Since then, she has become a recognised figure in the Cuban literary scene, with eight short-story collections and two novels (Noche de Ronda and Anima Fatua) to her name, participating in literary events throughout Europe and the Americas. She has also previously published three books of poetry: Retazos (de las hormigas) para los malos tiempos, Eslabones de un tiempo muerto and Un jardin en miniatura. 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.
ISBN 9781914278808 (hardback), 256pp., £20/€23/$25
ISBN 9781914278815 (eBook), £4.99/€5.99/$6.99
PUBLICATION DATE: 12 JUNE 2025
“Without doubt one of the greatest examples of the way in which Cuban women have taken the written word by the horns.” (Cuban critic, Marilyn Bobes)
“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.” (Granma)
“An autobiographical confession.” (Juventud Rebelde)
Also by Anna Lidia Vega Serova, and published by Amaurea Press:
