Sheyla Smanioto: 'It's a haunted story, where you know something is going to happen'

This summer series of podcasts has taken us from the snow and ice of AL Kennedy's Expedition Skills to the blunt heat of Ali McClary's Proper Magic, and from the staccato fragments of Pete Segall's Bolex Man to the unstoppable momentum of Dafydd McKimm's The Nosebleed.

We bring this season to a close with Sheyla Smanioto and the haunting threat of her short story Intruder, translated by Laura Garmeson and Sophie Lewis.

Speaking with the help of the interpreter Jaciara Topley Lira, Smanioto tells us that the story came to her with "almost the last sentence", in a dream where "Somebody was holding me by the throat and saying, 'Look how difficult it will be for me not to kill you when I'm choking you'."

She had to deliver that sentence so that she could recreate the feeling she had in the dream, she continues, "And so that's why I needed to trick the reader sometimes."

The slippery first-person plural, the sudden switches between the present and the past and the abrupt swerves into dialogue that keep the reader on their toes are also a challenge for the writer.

"So, in a way," Smanioto adds, "both me and the reader are victims of what the text needed."

Pito's bar is midway along the great journey from the country to the city that Smanioto charts in her novel Out of Earth.

"It's a historical movement," the author says. "It's a movement that brought my family to São Paulo. But when you look at it as a movement, it always looks like it is made up of a mass. But it's never a mass, it's made up of people."

The people who make this journey are left with a "specific type of loneliness", Smanioto continues, an emptiness that she has tried to fill with her writing by "creating a culture that was a sort of dream, a memory of the past".

Even though she calls herself a "very intellectual" writer, dreams are still central to her work.

"I have studied technique," Smanioto says, "I'm a literature graduate. But I can't create anything if I don't feel it in my skin first."

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.