Valeria Luiselli is an acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; and, most recently, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and the international bestseller Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a MacArthur "Genius Grant," and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, an American Book Award, the Folio Prize, and the 2021 International Dublin Literary Award. Her work has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her latest novel, Beginning Middle End, will be published in the US on July 28th by Knopf. We talk about how Valeria came to write her first novel in Spanish, even though English was the language she thought and studied in. And we also get into how she actually writes across two languages, since for Valeria it isn't a clean switch, but something closer to chaotic crossfade, with parts of a novel written in one language and then rewritten rather than simply translated into the other.
