The Survivor | Sònia Hernández | Granta Magazine

The Survivor

Sònia Hernández

Translated by Samantha Schnee

‘I should have died six years ago.’

Sònia Hernández

Born in Terrassa, Sònia Hernández grew up in a working-class town with an evocative name: Badia. She works as a literary critic for the cultura/s supplement in La Vanguardia. She has always felt drawn to the outskirts, not just the urban, though she never found there the sadness of landscape described by Michael Ende – the writer who made her a reader – or the rawness of the streets of Juan Marsé. She is the author of the poetry books La casa del mar (2006) and Los nombres del tiempo (2010). Hernández is the coordinator of the literary research magazine Quaderns de Vallençana, dedicated to the humanist Juan Ramón Masoliver. ‘The Survivor’ is from her collection of short stories Los enfermos erróneos (2008).

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Translated by Samantha Schnee

Samantha Schnee’s translation of Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft was shortlisted for the 2015 PEN America Translation Prize. She won the 2015 Gulf Coast Prize in Translation for her excerpt of Boullosa’s The Conspiracy of the Romantics, and her translation of Boullosa’s novel The Book of Anna was published by Coffee House Press in 2020.

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