11th March 2025
Interview
Author Q&A
Claudia Piñeiro
The bestselling Argentine multi-award winner, today’s LBF International Author of the Day, talks genre-fiction prejudice, Netflix success and resisting the Milei regime. Tom Tivnan reports
You are often described as a crime writer, which I find a little strange, as you don't write conventional mysteries. I don’t define myself as a writer of crime fiction, or detective stories, or indeed noir. I feel I am simply a novelist, though I also write short fiction, theatre and other kinds of texts. But the sea I’m most comfortable swimming in is the novel. And in these novels, which are basi- cally about characters and their internal conflicts, sometimes there appears a death, a mystery, a search for truth, and so people like to put a stamp on it and call it crime fiction. To a greater or lesser degree, I do use elements from crime fiction, but the resulting novel is anything but. I don’t think you could call Elena Knows a crime novel, even though the main character’s quest is to find out who killed her daughter. The reader knows what happened long before Elena does. And the narrative and the suspense of the book take a different path. The only novel of mine that I see as fitting into the genre is Betibú. In all the others, aspects of the crime genre are mixed in with the writing without that making it a noir. In any case, when someone says this I don’t protest or try to explain that they’re wrong. I’m
not offended by this reading, as some others are. On the contrary, I dislike the prejudice there is towards genre fiction. Fortunately, things are changing, but there was a time when a genre novel, whether crime, horror, or science fiction, felt excluded from mainstream literary prizes, regardless of how well it was written, but simply because genre fiction was consid- ered less serious. I don’t repudiate noir fiction, but if someone comes to one of my books look- ing for a crime novel, they will find something else, and perhaps even be disappointed. Some readers complain that in some of my novels the ending is left open. I don’t think that’s true; I think the reader is given what they need to understand the ending, but it’s true that I don’t fully develop it in the way that crime novels do so that no one is left in any doubt about who killed them and why. For me, the important answers are of a different kind.
I wonder how you go about shaping the story. Do you begin with the plot, the characters, or even with a specific scene? I always start out with an image. This image, which has something of the quality of a dream, stays in my head for a while until the characters
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begin to move around, to express their conflicts. Only then do I start to think about who they are, where they come from, why they’re there. We could say that this image is a scene. It might be the first scene in the novel, or the last, or in the middle – or not there at all. Because what follows is the development of the characters. The plot is nothing more than an instrument to allow me to understand who these characters are. Although, of course, I do treat the plot with care and try to manage the suspense in such a way that the reader will want to follow [the characters] along the path they take.
As someone who writes across multiple forms, do you always begin a project knowing what form it will take? My natural home in writing is the novel. The other texts emerged as a result of specific circumstances. I began to study playwriting because I wanted to perfect how my characters speak. Theatre is the closest thing to poetry, and it gives me a freedom I don’t have in the stories I tell that are much closer to reality. I love theatre, both going to the theatre and reading plays. The stories and the essays are the result of commissions. I am grateful to
London Book Fair
Interview
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