Elaine Vilar Madruga: 'I’m always thinking about Kafka when I write'

This Summer series we've already heard from Will Boast, EC Osondu, Robin Munby and Zhenya Oliinyk. But we bring it to a close with Elaine Vilar Madruga and her short story Wild, translated from Spanish by Samantha Luna.

Wild is not only a story about vengeance, Vilar Madruga says, it's also "a story about hope".

"It's about sisterhood and it's about resilience," she continues. "It's about the possibility of survivors telling their own stories. Having their own agenda, Having our own words."

Women have always spoken about male violence, Vilar Madruga explains, but it's always been behind closed doors.

"Now we don't have any whisper of fear," she says, "we have a screaming voice. And that screaming voice allows us to share with the world what we are thinking and what our great-grandmothers and our grandmothers thought in their own lives."

Vilar Madruga cites the Cuban saying "pueblo pequeño, infierno grande" – a small town is a large hell. Even though her stories are fantastical, unmoored in time and place, she's still exploring the shared experience of "the woman in the street".

"My reality, my space, my spiritual biography, the territories where I live are not only mine," she says. "It's a human experience. It's not a Caribbean experience, or a Cuban experience or a Latin American experience, it's a human experience."

The themes that run through Wild – male violence, motherhood, sisterhood – echo through her latest novel, La piel hembra (The Female Skin). And Vilar Madruga also returns to the idea of metamorphosis, with Kafka's story of a man who becomes an insect always at the back of her mind.

"I'm always thinking in all my novels how men and women – the fictional characters – become monsters."

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