Thursday 22 May 2025, Reference Point, Doors open at 7pm. Free for RSL Members/Fellows and Reference Point Members. Public tickets can be purchased for £8 (£5 concessions available).
Heralded as ‘one of Mexico’s greatest living writers’, Cristina Rivera Garza is a Mexican novelist whose decades of body of work has only recently become widely available to English-speaking readers.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author is here for a rare UK appearance on the publication of her latest novel, Death Takes Me. The book is a dark and dazzling literary thriller with poetry at its heart. It flips the traditional crime narrative on its head and navigates, with masterful imagination, the unstable terrains of gender, violence, death and desire.
For her only London appearance she will be in conversation with Mónica Parle.
The night will also feature poetry from Latinx-British poet, Leo Boix.
Praise for Cristina Rivera Garza’s Death Takes Me
‘A labyrinthine masterpiece’ New York Times
‘A subversive twist on the traditional serial killer story’ TIME
Schedule for the evening:
- 7PM: Doors open
- 7:30PM: Conversation
- 8:30PM: Intermission
- 9PM: Poetry readings
- 9:30-11PM: Book Signing x DJ
Cristina Rivera Garza is the award-winning author of The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest. The author of novels, short stories, poetry and non-fiction, she is the only writer to have twice won the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Prize. Her memoir Liliana’s Invincible Summer won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize and was a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. A recipient of the 2020 MacArthur Fellowship, Rivera Garza is the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Distinguished Chair and director of the PhD program in creative writing in Spanish at the University of Houston.
Mónica Ibarra Parle is a child of the US/Mexico border. She grew up shuttling between the bayous of southeast Texas and her grandparents’ house in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. She is a fourth-generation immigrant, now living in the UK. She is a member of the Macondo Writers’ Workshop. She won the 2022 Mslexia Short Story Competition and has been short-listed for the 2021 Bridport Peggy Chapman First Writing Award and the 2021 Wasafiri Queen Mary Prize. Her work was Highly Commended in Faber’s 2018 Fab Prize and published in Best Women’s Short Fiction 2022, The Bridport Prize Anthology 2021, Mslexia, and Wasafiri.
Mónica is currently Co-Executive Director of Forward Arts Foundation (the Forward Prizes and National Poetry Day) and Associate Director of Un Nuevo Sol, the British Latinx writers collective. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Houston while working for legendary Latinx publisher, Arte Público Press. Her biggest regret is that she was at Houston prior to Cristina Rivera Garza’s ground-breaking Spanish-language creative writing programme, which would have been a dream to take part in.
Leo Boix is a Latinx bilingual poet, translator and educator born in Argentina who lives in the UK. His first collection, Ballad of a Happy Immigrant (2021), was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice. Boix is the co-director of Un Nuevo Sol, a national scheme to nurture new Latinx writers in the UK. He is the editor of Hemisferio Cuir: An Anthology of Young Queer Latin American Poetry (2025). He was the recipient of the Bart Wolffe Poetry Prize 2018, the Keats-Shelley Prize 2019 and a PEN Award in 2021.
Presented in partnership with Reference Point.