Between a poem and a hard place: Anna Smith Spark’s art in grimdark
Dark fantasy and one of its spin-off genres currently on the up and up, grimdark, is not just the domain of male authors. Women authors have also embraced this mixture of action, violence, social commentary and realpolitik, providing it with a unique voice, innovative language and poetic prose full of lyricism. British writer Anna Smith Spark has demonstrated this with her trilogy Empires of Dust (Oz Editorial), the first instalment of which has just been published in Spanish as La corte de los cuchillos rotos. Influenced by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, as well as classical Greek and Latin authors, she has brought powerful images to the grimdark subgenre, without overlooking the genre’s characteristic elements, as seen in the work of some of its key names, like Joe Abercrombie: darkness and violence, morally complex characters and complicated political systems. One of the leading representatives of the grimdark genre in Spain, Carlos di Urarte, will talk with Smith Spark to break down the keys to the success of La corte de los cuchillos rotos and to analyse how subversion of the genre is also possible.
* Activity with simultaneous translation to spanish
