Gabriela Jauregui

Premio de Bellas Artes Narrativa Colima

The story unfolds on two timelines: a distant future where a group of archivists, narrating in a form reminiscent of a Greek chorus, investigates the lives of four friends in our near future. These friends live in a commune and possess special qualities – Diana's prophetic visions, Saratoga's musical talent, Yunuen's quest for the coherence of reality, and Eugenia's journey to Teotihuacán. Their story's turning point is “Day 0”, or “The Worst Day”, when Diana receives a devastating call: her friend Eugenia has been murdered while working on an archaeological excavation in Teotihuacán. 

The novel delves into complex, raw themes such as femicide, the visceral pain of loss, and the resistance encountered on the slow and arduous path of seeking justice through the institutions. Feral is also an ode to friendship, community and the collective creation of spaces, in contrast to today's hyper-individualized world. The juxtaposition of the novel's poetic language and the horrors it portrays, along with the complex ensemble of voices telling the story, defies pessimism or cynicism.

“If we could listen to the future, this would be its voice. Gabriela Jauregui has made time speak: through the voices in the commune, the narrative of loss and absence is woven while the ultimate trench of resistance is raised: language, testimony.” Emiliano Monge

“An audacious and turbulent narrative [...]. With an intimate and powerful prose, the novel shapes a lush archive that explores the dynamics of solidarity and affection among women, while also confronting the harsh realities of femicide, impunity, and discrimination, among other scourges of contemporary Mexico.” Fernanda Melchor, Guillermo Arriaga, and Socorro Venegas as the jury of First Novel Amazon Award

“Gabriela Jauregui's debut novel is a tour de force from the very first page.” Radio Fórmula México

“Feral, Gabriela Jauregui's highly anticipated novel, is essential narrative to comprehend the turbulent present from a perspective of real resistance. Jauregui masterfully addresses the various facets of forced disappearance and gender violence from a feminist and intersectional standpoint.” Revista de la Universidad de México

Conceived as an epigone of cabinets of curiosities, Gabriela Jauregui’s first nook of short stories explores, in the way rooms of wonders once used to, a fantastical universe which conjures up objects, beings, situations, and stories which we thought we knew, seen though the warm open-mindedness the writer feels before the world, which we discover anew in a series of captivating experiences. An ‘Astronaut Tree’ which treks the distance between Earth and the Moon through the gentle swaying of its leaves, a sculptor who puts her materials to the test through the capabilities and limitations of their ingredients, a business which attempts to profit from our bodies even after we die, a medium who is able to communicate with oil fields that tell her where they are and warn against possible disasters, a genetically modified, progressive fox who learns to speak and reveals an inner life which exceeds all ‘domestic outer camouflage’, the symbiotic relationship which exists between prey and hunter, a screen which expands over time or a teenage girl who exposes the inner scars from outer deformities, all revealed in a prose filled with poetic images (‘I draw a spiral on a sheet of paper, I’m a perpetual, porous ear’) which accompany sympathetic, dark, complex, characters, in subtle, powerful writing that restores the dignity to objects freeing them from the pragmatic, everyday gaze.

“Their importance comes not only from their originality and expressive style, which draws in the reader through prose filled with twists and turns, and surprising detail, but because she has succeeded in galvanizing her poetics to discover new creative paths that fuse poetry, essay and conventional prose and all their descriptive potential.” Sergio González Rodríguez

“The Memory of Things is a book that’s on the attack. Sentences sculpted rather than written (…). I feel it is poetic. Written with the windows open and even with cool breeze, as if we are before great poetry, as if objective words gave The Memory of Things a subjective warmth the writer has rationally rejected.” El Universal

“Jauregui endows her stories with spontaneity, as if they seem written as they came to her mind; consequently, they are messy, abrupt and profound. At the same time, she takes the most banal of things as her raw material and focuses deep with them, giving them a voice, a touch of weirdness and a past history, which at first sight, they didn’t seem to have.” Criticismo

“The Memory of Things, anoints with exquisite language, known as poetic prose, a unique alphabet of objects (…) An collection of stories which reveals the ordinary as surprising once again.” El Espectador