Eighth Wonder

VLADY KOCIANCICH (1941-2022) was a writer, literary critic, and translator. Alberto Manguel includes her in "that prestigious and select group of essential Argentine writers kept secret." While Borges taught her to read, Bioy Casares taught her to write, yet her genealogy and approach to the fantastic are uniquely her own. Her influences range from H. G. Wells to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Julio Cortázar. She is the author of over a dozen books, including the novels The Eighth Wonder (1982), The Last Days of William Shakespeare (1984), and El templo de las mujeres (1996); the short story collections Coraje (1971), Cuando leas esta carta (1998), and La ronda de los jinetes muertos (1996, finalist for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in 2007); and the essay collection La raza de los nerviosos (2006). Her translations into Spanish include Joseph Conrad's The End of the Tether. She also taught at the Complutense University of Madrid, and regularly contributed to the newspapers La Nación and Clarín. She won awards including the City of Buenos Aires Short Story Prize, the Torrente Ballester Prize, two Konex Foundation and Fondo Nacional de las Artes Jorge Luis Borges Prizes, and the Esteban Echeverría Trajectory Prize.