Mariana Enríquez is a novelist, journalist and short story writer from Argentina. As well as two short story collections, she is the author of a collection of travel writings, a novella and three novels. In 2019, her novel Our Share of Night was awarded the prestigious Premio Herralde de Novela. She is an editor at Página/12, a newspaper based in Buenos Aires.

Her work has been translated into more than 20 languages and compared to that of the greats, including Shirley Jackson and Jorge Luis Borges. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021 and was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. 

Within, Enríquez populates contemporary urban Argentina with a macabre cast of crooked witches, unruly teenagers, homeless ghosts and hungry women. As terrifying as they are socially conscious, the stories press into the unspoken – fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history – with bracing urgency. The book’s fans now include Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro, who praised the book’s ‘beautiful, horrible world,’ calling it ‘the most exciting discovery [he] made in fiction for some time.’

From an interview and extract to a guide for book clubs, find out more about our October Monthly Spotlight here.