Shipwrecks, dive bars, possession, and science - this is where contemporary horrors and ancient terrors meet.

In Fresh Dirt from the Grave , a hillside is "an emerald saddle teeming with evil and beauty." It is this collision of harshness and tenderness that animates Giovanna Rivero's short stories, where no degree of darkness (buried bodies, lost children, wild paroxysms of violence) can take away from the gentleness she shows all violated creatures. A mad aunt haunts her family, two Bolivian children are left on the outskirts of a Metis reservation outside Winnipeg, a widow teaches origami in a women's prison and murders, housefires, and poisonings abound, but so does the persistent bravery of people trying to forge ahead in the face of the world. They are offered cruelty, often, indifference at best, and yet they keep going. Rivero has reworked the boundaries of the gothic to engage with pre-Columbian ritual, folk tales, sci-fi and eroticism, and found in the wound their humanity and the possibility of hope.

Giovanna Rivero is a Bolivian writer named by the Guadalajara Book Fair as one of the 25 emerging stars of Latin American literature. Her short story collection Fresh Dirt from the Grave , published by Charco Press, introduced her work to English-language readers. Her writing is widely recognised for renewing the fantastic genre in Latin American fiction.

Isabel Adey is a literary translator and editor working with Spanish, German and English. Originally from Yorkshire, she now lives in Edinburgh, where she also works as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. Her translation of Giovanna Rivero's Fresh Dirt from the Grave was longlisted for the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute translation prize in 2024, following a shortlisting for her co-translation of Marvel Moreno's December Breeze in 2023. Her translations span multiple disciplines, from literary fiction to nonfiction and academia. She has a passion for writing that deals with cultural identity, class politics and migration.