Anima Fatua

Winner English PEN Translates Award 2025

In Anima Fatua, Anna Lidia Vega Serova draws on her own experiences of growing up in the late Soviet Union to craft a deeply unsettling coming-of-age novel. In the wake of her parent’s divorce, Alia (the novel’s beguiling protagonist) is forced to negotiated her linguistic, racial and sexual otherness amid the maelstrom of perestroika. Despite the many horrors to which she is exposed, largely at the hands of the novel’s grim menagerie of male characters, Alia exerts her own agency at every turn. More antihero than tragic victim, Alia responds in kind to the cruelty around her. She confounds and enthrals as she leads us on a harrowing journey through a country on the brink.

Originally published in Spanish to much acclaim in 2008, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Robin Munby – and has been awarded an English PEN Translates award. This is a story full of emotional intensity and dark humour, which in particular will appeal to readers of Margarita García Robayo, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya or Sayaka Murata, looking to delve back into world of complex, charismatic women.