This Peruvian writer and journalist Gabriela Wiener is the author of books such as Sexografías, Nueve Lunas, Llamada Perdida and Dicen de mí. She won the Peruvian National Journalism Prize for an investigation into gender violence in the literary world. Since 2003 she has lived in Spain and she writes for various media outlets. Huaco retrato (2021) deals with her family past, bound up, as it is, to the history of Peru and Latin America. A huaco retrato is a ceramic item made by the native people of Peru. In 1878, the Jewish-Austrian explorer Charles Wiener, the author’s great-great-grandfather, carried off four thousand pre-Colombian artefacts, which brought him fame at the Universal Exhibition. A hundred and fifty years later, in a museum in Paris that contains the collection that her ancestor took, the protagonist faces this stolen memory and reflects on her history, which is the history of a continent, or two, and on the consequences of colonization and racism on our lives and on our present. In conversation with Marco Avilés.
