Rodrigo Urquiola Flores: 'Everything in this short story is true'

We began this Winter series of podcasts with Cynthia Zarin, who suggested that every single one of us is torn in different ways. We'll be examining those cracks with Tim Conley, Cynthia Banham and Samuel Rigg over the next few weeks, but this time we welcome Rodrigo Urquiola Flores and the translator Shaina Brassard.

According to Urquiola, his short story DYSNEYWORLD is all true. The author says that – just like his character – he grew up in a couple of small rooms on the edge of La Paz and sometimes stayed in the big house where his grandma worked, a childhood he says was like "living in two worlds".

The gap between one world and another was hard he continues, but he's "not complaining. When I was a child, that arduous path exhausted me too much. But everything I experienced, when it wasn't sad or painful, seemed fun, full of adventures and discoveries."

Other writers might have explored these memories in autobiography, but when Urquiola started writing about a football match it came out as fiction. He compares memory to a bolt of lightning, which suddenly "illuminates everything".

"The short story is the genre where this magical feeling can be achieved and left to linger in the mind," he says.

While there are always losses when you translate from Spanish to English, Brassard argues that it's worth the heartache to get a flavour of La Paz.

"Rodrigo's writing captures the rhythms, the poetry, the way that people talk," she says.

This reportage is central to Urquiola's project.

"A writer is simply an observer who reads," he explains. "Writing is a way of reading."

But there's still a lot of freedom in the way an author can make these observations.

"Any genre is useful to say the truth," Urquiola insists, "not just realism. When I read great sci-fi, for example Philip K Dick, he is telling me the truth. He's showing me the world in a way that's possible to see it and I don't think he's lying to me."

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