Discover the shortlist: Claudia Piñeiro, ‘I’ve always been very rebellious’
The globally bestselling author and scriptwriter discusses the inspiration behind the unlikely protagonist at the heart of her novel Elena Knows.
Claudia Piñeiro is best known for her crime novels, which are bestsellers in Argentina, Latin America and around the world. Many of her novels have been adapted for the big screen.
As an author and scriptwriter for television, Piñeiro has already won numerous national and international prizes, among them the renowned German LiBeraturpreis for Elena Knows and the prestigious Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize for Las grietas de Jara (A Crack in the Wall). She is the third most translated Argentinean author, after Borges and Cortázar.
More recently, Piñeiro has become a very active figure in the fight for the legalisation of abortion in Argentina and for the legal recognition of writers as workers. Her fiction (as shown with Elena sabe) stems from the detective novel but has recently turned increasingly political.